


The Abyss Gazes Also

by Philosopher_King



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Angst and Humor, Asexual Loki, BAMF Loki, Clint as father hen, Criminal Masterminds, Fantastic Racism, Gallows Humor, Gen, Loki Angst, Loki In The Void, Loki and Gamora are bros, Loki is kind of obsessed with his clothes, Loki's Lost Year, Loki-centric, Mind Rape, Nietzschean Loki, Post-Thor (2011), Pre-Avengers (2012), Psychological Torture, Psychological Trauma, Snarky Loki, Stockholm Syndrome, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, Thanos has a weird sense of humor, Torture, Whump sort of but not really
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-19
Updated: 2017-07-31
Packaged: 2018-05-02 05:53:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 15
Words: 72,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5236796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Philosopher_King/pseuds/Philosopher_King
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I imagine you’re wondering how I survived my fall into the Void to eventually arrive on Earth, looking like death warmed over (but a very stylishly attired death, I might add). It’s a fairly interesting story, if not a pleasant one, so I’m perfectly willing to tell you. I do, after all, have rather a lot of time to kill."</p><p>After his fall, Loki finds his way into the criminal underworld of the Andromeda Galaxy, where he makes a name for himself with his unusual skills and attracts the attention of Thanos.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> The title is kind of ripped off from a chapter of Alan Moore's _Watchmen,_ but it's intended as more of a Nietzsche reference than a _Watchmen_ reference. The significance (beyond the word "abyss") will become clear later on.
> 
> A cautionary note: this work is not a representative member of the genre known as "Loki whump": Loki gets to spend a bit of time doing cool stuff before he gets captured by Thanos; there is some torture, but it's mostly psychological, so there's not much graphic description of physical torture. It's also first person past tense narration, so Loki gets to filter things through his dry sense of humor. Basically, I'm trying to explain how Loki ended up the level of crazy he was in _The Avengers,_ which was pretty crazy but not so totally batshit that he couldn't pull it back together by _The Dark World._

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loki has been imprisoned after his failed invasion of Midgard. A prison guard who encountered Loki as a boy asks him what could have led him to attempt such an invasion. With some preamble, and under some conditions, Loki agrees.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This prologue is something of an experiment. Since I started writing this fic, I knew I wanted Loki to be talking to someone, but I hadn't figured out who it should be. I had an idea that was kind of inspired by my fic [Silver and Gold](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5047336/chapters/11606062) (which, as usual, takes place in the same timeline as this one), in which Loki helps Sif to get training as a warrior despite being a woman, on the grounds that "I’ve always thought everyone should be allowed to do what they’re best at, regardless of what class or gender they were born into." Hence... well, you'll get it when you read the rest.
> 
> I found the guard's name by looking at a list of baby names from Old Norse. I chose "Endre" because (1) I liked the sound and (2) the site said it means "one who rides alone." That's pretty badass, right?

_“Your Highness… do you remember me?”_

_Endre’s heart was hammering, and he was all but holding his breath, as Prince Loki slowly raised his eyes from the book in his hands and looked at him, his gaze cool and impassive._

_“Should I?” he asked, his eyebrows slightly raised._

_“I was that stable boy—the one who wanted to join the Einherjar.  You walked in on me one day, pretending my shovel was a spear…”_

_“Oh yes,” Loki said mildly, with a polite if unenthusiastic smile.  “I asked you if you were fighting the enemies of the realm, and you said you would, if only you were allowed to train as a warrior.”_

_“And you said you thought it was foolish,” Endre pressed on, in a rush, his voice almost shaking with his nerves and excitement.  “Foolish that a willing volunteer should be kept from the ranks of Asgard’s defenders because he was lowborn, because his parents were servants.”_

_“Well, it is foolish,” Loki said, his smile still restrained, but growing more sincere._

_“But you were the only one who said so,” Endre said earnestly.  “You were the one who spoke to the master-at-arms for me, who made it possible for me to train…”_

_“Really, I just spoke to my—to the Queen,” Loki said in a confidential tone, his mouth twitching playfully, almost masking the slight stumble in his words.  “I was as frightened of the master-at-arms as you were, no doubt.”_

_“Even then?” Endre exclaimed; his nerves escaped in a too-loud laugh.  “You had already come of age, you were a full warrior of Asgard!”_

_“I was never his best student,” Loki said slyly.  “I often had trouble… following orders.”_

_“Oh,” Endre said with another nervous little laugh.  They were edging dangerously close to the all-too-obvious topic of Loki’s imprisonment and the crimes for which it was to punish him._

_Seeming to sense Endre’s hesitation, Loki directed them back away from that topic, at least for the moment.  “So I see you have made it into the ranks of the Einherjar after all.  My congratulations.”_

_“And for that I am grateful to you every day, every hour…”  Endre realized he was gushing, but somehow he couldn’t seem to stop himself._

_“Psshh,” Loki replied, waving a hand dismissively.  “Don’t give me all the credit, or I shall have to shoulder all the blame when you realize how tedious it is.  Speaking of which,” he added with a wry smile that held just the shadow of sadness, “how did you get yourself stuck with prison guard duty?  Did your sergeant find that your bunk was not entirely tidy?  Did you miss a spot when cleaning your weapons?”_

_Endre cleared his throat uncomfortably; he knew they could not avoid this subject forever.  “No, actually, I, ah… I requested prison duty.”_

_Loki stared at him, momentarily bemused.  “Well, I suppose that with only one prisoner in the dungeons, the chances of being called on to suppress any disturbances is quite low…”_

_Endre ducked his head, feeling his face grow hot.  “That’s not why.”  But he forced himself to meet Loki’s eyes when he said, “I… I wanted to talk to you.”_

_Loki’s eyes hardened.  “What, you wanted to ask me how I could have done all those terrible things?” he asked, mimicking a tone of moral outrage._

_Endre’s face flushed hotter than ever, and he started to feel sick to his stomach.  “Well—yes.  Or—not how, but why.”_

_Loki fixed him with a cold, steely gaze.  “When a boy is told all his life that he was born to be a king, it should not come as such a great surprise that he winds up believing it.”_

_Endre started to speak, but it came out as a croak, so he cleared his throat and tried again.  “See, that’s—that’s exactly why I thought there must be something else.  Some other reason.  I know that’s what you said at your trial before the All-Father—word gets around amongst the guards, you know.  But I didn’t believe it, that that was your real reason.  Because you’d told me you thought it was foolish that someone’s birth—who his parents were—should determine his path in life; and you just said it again, not five minutes ago.  And you didn’t just_ say _it, you_ did _something about it; you made sure my birth_ didn’t _determine my future.  You don’t believe in birthrights—not that kind, anyway.  So I want to know why you really did it.  Invaded Midgard and all.”_

_The words came tumbling out in a rush, stammering and inarticulate and disorganized, and by the time he finished Endre knew his face must be red as a beet._

_Loki’s face had softened, though.  “Tell me,” he began, and raised his eyebrows expectantly._

_“Endre,” the guard filled in for him hurriedly._

_“Tell me, Endre—” Loki’s gentle tone still had a steel edge to it—“do you think I’m a good man?”_

_Endre gaped for a moment, then said, with an embarrassing squeak in his voice, “I’ve always thought so.”_

_Loki sighed.  “I’m not.  I want you to get that out of your head right away.”_

_“But—”_

_Loki held up his hand, and Endre fell silent.  “I want you to dismiss any notion you might have that I’m too kind, or too peace-loving, or—the Norns forbid—too_ egalitarian _to voluntarily attempt to conquer and rule Midgard.”_

_“But you said yourself you think class divisions are foolish…”_

_“I think_ hereditary _class divisions are foolish,” Loki corrected him.  “I believe in an aristocracy of spirit, not of birth.  But leaving that aside for the moment—I do not want you to get any sentimental notions about my moral character, do you understand me?  You are not to think that I was compelled, or coerced, into doing what I did—that I bear no responsibility, or did not act of my own ‘free will’… whatever sense that term can be given.”_

_“I—I understand,” Endre answered, taken aback by the heat in Loki’s voice, and the fire in his eyes._

_“And if I am to tell you the story behind my invasion of Midgard, you will repeat to_ no one _what I have said to you—not your fellow guardsmen, not your wife, not your mother.  Above all, you will say_ nothing _to any of the royal family.  If I hear anything suggesting that you have spoken of this to anyone—any chatter from the other guards, any hints dropped by the Queen, any suspicious visits or questions from Thor or Odin—I will never speak a word to you again, and I will do everything in my power to have you dishonorably dismissed from the ranks of the Einherjar.  Do I make myself clear?”_

_Endre felt as if Loki’s eyes were boring holes into his skull.  “Perfectly clear, Your Highness.”_

_“Good,” said Loki, his demeanor suddenly relaxing into open warmth.  “Then I am quite happy to provide an answer to your question.  After my own fashion, that is.”_ _Loki paused.  “Don’t you have somewhere to sit?  The telling will no doubt go on for a while, today and for a number of days after, I expect.”_

_“Don’t worry,” Endre said, cautiously allowing himself a wry grin.  “I have been trained to stand for at least six hours at a time.”_

_Loki raised his eyebrows, looking faintly horrified.  “That may be, but it would make_ me _uncomfortable to have you standing at attention all the while.”_

_“Of course.”  There was a chair that was sitting in a shadowed corner just inside the outer doors to the dungeons, for when they had prisoners who were allowed visitors (Loki was not one of them).  Endre pulled it over and sat facing Loki, seated in his own (rather more comfortable, it appeared) armchair, which the Queen had had brought for him._

_“Now,” said Loki, businesslike.  “What do you know of the circumstances of my supposed death?”_

_Very carefully, Endre replied, “The All-Father told the Realm that you d— that you fell while protecting Asgard from a Jötun invasion.  The Jötnar had recaptured the Casket of Ancient Winters and used it to hold the Bifröst open while they sent an army through… you and Prince Thor were trying to fight them off, but there were too many.  Prince Thor saw that the only way to stop them was to break the bridge itself.  You were caught in the resulting explosion; Prince Thor tried to catch you, but he couldn’t reach you in time and you fell into the Void.”_

_“An impressive invention,” Loki remarked.  “I might even be touched that they sought to shield my memory from dishonor, if I did not know that the true story would redound to their discredit as well.  But come, Endre; I did not ask what Odin said about the circumstances of my death.  I asked what_ you _know.”_

 _Endre cleared his throat uncomfortably.  “The guards talk amongst themselves, as I said.  I don’t_ know _much, but I’ve heard… rumors.  I heard that you let King Laufey and his soldiers into Asgard, only to kill them when they tried to murder the All-Father.  That you blasted your brother through a wall of the palace… Prince Thor, I mean,” he corrected hurriedly when he saw Loki’s mouth twist in anger and distaste.  He lowered his voice and his eyes, shy of meeting Loki’s gaze, when he added, “I heard that—that you and the All-Father had some kind of argument before he fell into the Odinsleep.  That something he said to you must have—well, that you weren’t the same afterward.”_

_“You were going to say that something he said to me must have driven me mad,” Loki said pleasantly, but with a strange glint in his eye that was part amusement, and part something more savage._

_Endre opened his mouth to deny it, but Loki waved a hand and said, “No, that is quite right.  At least, it drove me temporarily mad.  Or partly mad… I don’t suppose it has entirely gone away.  And I suppose there must have been a spark of madness there before, waiting to be fanned into flame.”_

_Endre stared at him, stunned into silence by the cavalier air with which he made these declarations._

_Loki laughed at his astonishment.  “I didn’t seem mad, you might have said, but I speak so calmly of my own madness that now you have your doubts!  But of course you wish to know: what was it Odin told me that drove me partly-or-temporarily mad?_

_“It was this: that I am not by blood the son of Odin and Frigga, nor even Aesir.  Odin found me as a baby, left to die in the temple at Utgard, after the final battle of the war with Jötunheim.  Nor was I just any giant’s cast-off runt, but the ill-made, unwanted get of Laufey himself.”_

_Loki watched Endre with narrowed eyes as he took in the revelation, and struggled to master his shock.  “So you—you killed…?”_

_“Yes, I killed my own father to save Odin.  But of course I arranged it that way; I invited Laufey to come and kill him in his sleep.  And then in, er,_ retaliation _for this cowardly attempt on Odin’s life, I turned the full force of the Bifröst on Jötunheim—bolstered by the power of their own Casket—in order to destroy it.”_

_“Destroy it?” Endre asked, puzzled.  “But the Bifröst…”_

_“…when left open long enough, ceases to be a passageway and becomes a weapon.  So yes, I tried to wipe out my own kind—all but one, that is.  Thor tried to stop me—this after I sent the Destroyer to Midgard to prevent him from returning; I almost left that bit out.  In the end I ordered it to—to kill him.  He survived, of course—or perhaps was resurrected by Mjölnir; it wasn’t entirely clear.  At any rate: he confronted me at the Observatory and tried to persuade me out of my wicked scheme; but at last he realized that he could stop it only by breaking the bridge.”_

_Endre was shaking his head in horrified disbelief; he seemed unable to form words.  Loki smiled joylessly and plunged on._

_“The rest happened…_ almost _as you have heard.  The explosion flung us over the edge; but Thor did manage to catch me, and Odin woke just in time to stop him from falling as well.”_

_Endre finally managed to croak out, “So how…?” before his voice failed him again._

_Loki’s unnerving smile broadened.  “Thus it was that, hanging over the rift torn in space by the collapse of the Bifröst, I tried to explain to my supposed_ father _that I had only been doing what I thought he would have wanted.  ‘No, Loki,’ he told me.”  Loki’s eyes drifted out of focus, as if he were seeing something that was not there—seeing into the past, perhaps; but then he came back to himself and finished, chillingly matter-of-fact once more: “So I let go.”_

_Endre was again reduced to staring at him silently in shock and horror and perhaps pity._

_“So there you have it,” Loki said, with too-deliberate cheerfulness.  “The catalogue of my crimes.  Successful patricide; attempted fratricide (or perhaps successful, I’m still not certain); attempted xenocide; ignominious attempted suicide.  Do you still believe that I would not have attacked Midgard merely because I had a whim to rule it?  Or even just to watch it burn?”_

_Endre recovered his voice enough to protest, somewhat weakly: “You—you were not yourself; you had suffered a—a great shock…”_

_“Yes; I had been driven mad by the revelation of my true identity,” Loki agreed with sly amusement.  “But that does not mean I was ‘not myself.’”_

_“I suppose I’ll be able decide that for myself, once I’ve heard your tale,” Endre said, drawing on some supply of nerve he had not known was there._

_“Perhaps,” said Loki, with an amused quirk of his mouth.  “But even aside from the invasion business, I imagine you’re wondering how I survived my fall into the Void to eventually arrive on Earth_ , _looking like death warmed over (but a very stylishly attired death, I might add).  It is a fairly interesting story, if not a pleasant one, so I’m perfectly willing to tell you.  I do, after all, have rather a lot of time to kill._ ”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case you're wondering: I used the word "xenocide" (which I think was coined by Orson Scott Card as a term for killing an entire alien species) rather than "genocide" because (1) that may be a more accurate term for what killing all the Jotnar amounts to, and (2) the emotional resonances work better for me. (Yes, I know Orson Scott Card is a homophobic asshole, but it's a useful word and I have fond high school memories of reading _Ender's Game_ and its sequels.)
> 
> Please let me know if this prologue gambit was successful, especially people who had read the rest of the fic before. If not, I can always take it out.


	2. Second Chances

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loki falls, lands on a little moon in the Nova Empire, runs into some less-than-friendly characters, sells his armor, buys a new coat, and figures out how to survive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Chapter-specific warnings:** very intense suicidal thoughts; brief threat of rape.

When I let go, I fully believed I would die, and I welcomed it. Trying desperately not to spend my last minutes thinking about the disastrous events that had led me to let myself fall—or hearing Odin’s last “No, Loki” clanging in my skull as my own death knell—I searched through my memory for what I’d learned about what happens to the body in empty space. I wondered idly whether I would freeze or suffocate first. Of course I wouldn’t freeze, I realized, thanks to my recently discovered heritage. Suffocation it was, then. I wondered if it would feel anything like drowning; I’d heard that wasn’t such a bad way to go. Already in the first few seconds before I fell into the gaping hole in space, I started to feel the strangeness of my lungs seeking for air and finding none. It was strange, but it didn’t hurt.

And then I fell into the abyss. The silent rush of light was familiar from the many times I’d used the Bifröst, but without the usual controls, it was as airless as the space outside, and I felt an immense pressure—I didn’t know if I was being crushed or ripped apart; it felt like both. My body was panicking, but my mind was utterly calm. As the edges of my vision began to darken and my thoughts became sluggish and faint, I relished the knowledge that once I lost consciousness, I would never regain it. (I do not believe in an afterlife; I find that those who, like me, have read extensively about physics, biology, and the multitude of religious traditions throughout the universe, each positing a different afterlife, frequently do not.) It was over. My desolate failed life was over.

So imagine my dismay and fury when I did regain consciousness, cold, weak, my whole body aching, at dusk in some sort of half-desert landscape. I had considered the odds: the overwhelming likelihood was that the wormhole would spit me out somewhere else in empty space. Even in the very unlikely event that it did not, the number of habitable planets is very small; I would most likely end up suffocating on a lifeless rock, or burned to ash in a star. But somehow, in defiance of all laws of probability, I was breathing in the atmosphere of a fertile planet. In retrospect, I would guess that whatever controls remained from the shattered Bifröst led it to seek out a habitable world. But at the time, my furious, despairing mind could only conclude that the universe itself was trying to spite me. (I have not yet ruled out that hypothesis; it might have been overdetermined.)

I wanted to weep with rage, but found that I could not; my traitorous body had decided, against my own judgment, that it could not spare the energy or the water. I lay where I had fallen, consoling myself that at least eventually I would die of exposure, or thirst, or starvation. No, I realized, I didn’t need to wait that long. I pushed myself to my knees and, summoning the little power I had left, conjured one of the daggers that are my preferred weapon. Shaking with the effort it had taken, I considered my options. I could remove my armor and plunge the dagger into my heart. I could open the veins in my wrists or my neck and let myself bleed to death. If I were feeling particularly bold, I could try to cut my own throat, or pierce through my eye to my brain (though I suspected that the instinctive aversion to injuring one’s eye would make that route especially difficult).

The wrists seemed easiest. Fingers clumsy with cold and exhaustion, I began to unbuckle my vambraces. I vaguely remembered that it works best to start with the wrist of the dominant hand—it will be better able to maintain enough control to cut the other wrist while injured and bleeding copiously. (Had I given this any thought before? Funny you should ask.) I pulled up my right sleeve, grasped the dagger in my left hand, poised it over the vein—and froze. Suicide, it turned out, was much easier when the means presented themselves naturally. When dangling over a precipice, it’s easy enough to let go. But now, I had the time to ask myself: is this really what you want? And I found I wasn’t sure.

I didn’t believe in fate, any more than I believed in an afterlife. But since, against all odds, I had survived the fall that I had been so certain would kill me, wasn’t I wasting an opportunity by killing myself now? After all, I must be on some distant planet, far beyond the Nine Realms. There was no remnant here of the old life I was so happy to be rid of: no Thor to be forever measured against, no Odin to find me always wanting; no Sif and the Warriors Three to look at me with constant mockery and mistrust, no Frigga to look at me with kindhearted pity. I could start anew.

Once I had decided not to die, my instincts of self-preservation were jolted into action. There was no water or food in sight, only low clumps of desert brush. I scanned the horizon for signs of habitation—and saw a faint glow from a cluster of lights, not too far in the distance. A town. I stood shakily, gathering my cloak about me against the cold desert evening and the rising wind. Still clutching the dagger I had conjured, I began to stumble toward the glow of civilization. All my joints protested, recalling their recent abuse by rapidly fluctuating levels of gravity, but I glared at them mentally and my steps began to steady.

The first structure I sighted, on the outskirts of the town, was a farmhouse surrounded by an enclosure containing some strange alien livestock (they looked rather like a blue-scaled cross between horses and kangaroos). I stopped some distance away from it, suddenly painfully aware that my regal attire—the ornate bronze and steel armor, the ridiculous green cloak—would make me look utterly out of place, and draw undesirable attention, on any world I could think of. Two possible solutions presented themselves: I could use a glamor to give myself some more unobtrusive clothing, or I could make myself entirely invisible. Invisibility seemed the safer option: even in a less absurd outfit, someone with hostile intentions might still spot me as an outsider; and if they chanced to touch me, the glamor would dissipate anyway. Invisibility would allow me to go entirely undetected until I found a reasonably secure source of food and shelter. But it was also a more demanding piece of magic, and I wasn’t sure I had the reserves to maintain it for long. I made an attempt with it, but I could feel my hold on the spell shaking as if it were an object that was too heavy for me to lift. I could tell that I was sputtering in and out of visibility, which would attract far more suspicious attention than even my unusual clothing. I would have to trust in the glamor. I had no idea what the local population here wore, and I needed to use something familiar so that I could visualize it in full detail, so I pictured the long leather coat that was my usual daywear in Asgard, mentally threw it over myself, and hoped for the best.

When I reached the farmhouse, the first thing my eyes were drawn to was a water pump next to the fence, its spout over one end of a trough at which one of the blue beasts was drinking. The creature looked up at me, curious but not alarmed, and its fellows, scattered about the enclosure, also turned their heads in my direction. I put my finger to my lips and thought at them, gently but emphatically, that I was completely uninteresting; and, open to suggestion as most animals are, they turned back to whatever they had been doing. As I drew closer to the pump, I saw that the metal around its joints was rough and oxidized, and I feared that if I attempted to use it, the inhabitants of the farmhouse would hear. I did not know how they would respond to a trespassing stranger, entirely at their mercy, with no witnesses save for the blue beasts. And so, swallowing my pride, I dipped my cupped hands into the animals’ trough and drank. It was probably one of the least dignified things I had ever done in my life so far; but I dimly foresaw that this was far from the lowest I would have to let my dignity sink if I was to survive in this strange world. Filthy as I knew it was, the water was the sweetest I had ever tasted. As hunger is the best sauce, so desperate thirst is the best filtration system.

Feeling both my body and my will strengthened, I continued toward the town. After some time I left dirt roads behind for paved ones, but on the edge of town, the streets were still deserted; the buildings were only sparsely lit, and many seemed to have been abandoned: some windows were shattered, some walls marked with strange signs. It was becoming horribly clear that I was in the wrong part of town when I heard footsteps approaching from behind me—the footsteps of six or seven men. Undoubtedly they had already seen me, so it was too late to try invisibility again. I maintained my pace; to speed up would be to show fear. If I was lucky, they had somewhere else to go, and they would pay me no notice.

I was not lucky. “You—you ain’t from around here,” said a voice. He was speaking the lingua franca of the Nova Empire (or a dialect of it), I recalled from my childhood studies: not in the Nine Realms, but within the known universe.

I turned around. “I beg your pardon?” The group—seven, as it turned out—stopped a few feet away from me. They comprised a variety of alien races: two had blue skin, one green; three had strange bony protrusions from their skulls. The one who had spoken appeared to have some Kree ancestry. They were all wearing uniforms of dark red leather.

“What are you, Terran?” he continued.

“I’m afraid I don’t—oh. You mean from Earth?” Should I run with that story? Better than Asgardian, surely.

“I’ve still never tasted Terran,” remarked one of the men with the odd facial protrusions.

 _Never tasted…?_ Were they actually talking about _eating_ me? I held up my hands and began to back away. Apparently this wasn’t the right thing to do (though what would have been?), because the green fellow darted forward and grabbed my wrist, saying, “Now just might be your chance.”

The glamor faded with a shimmer of green light, and there I stood in my gleaming armor and absurd cloak. The one who had grabbed me pulled his hand away as if it had been burned. Several of them gaped. “What are you, Asgardian or something?” the part-Kree man asked.

Before I could reply, the one who had never tasted Terran commented, “I’ve never tasted Asgardian, either.”

“Looks like some sort of Asgardian prince,” said a voice from somewhere in the pack. The accuracy of his guess, improbably, added to the already extreme discomfort of the situation. I glanced around as quickly and subtly as I could, mapping out the positions of my attackers and all possible exit routes, and summoned a dagger into each hand, but kept them hidden beneath my cloak.

“But he’s as pretty as a princess,” the part-Kree leader leered, drawing a knife and gesturing with it perilously close to my face.

“Wonder if he’ll taste like one,” someone else guffawed, and suddenly I was not at all sure they were talking about eating me. Definitely time to get out. I dodged around the leader’s knife, plunged the dagger I held in my left hand into his throat, and flung the other dagger into the pack. Someone yelled, but I didn’t stop to see whom I’d hit. I conjured a simulacrum of myself and, summoning all the strength that sheer terror can provide, made myself invisible. I sent the simulacrum running down the same street, while I ducked into a narrow alleyway to my left. Predictably, the ruffians gave chase after my double. At some point, I heard a cry of dismay as someone attempted to grab it and it melted away.

Meanwhile, I had reached the next street over. The buildings were beginning to look cleaner and more reputable. Still invisible, and muffling the sound of my footsteps for good measure, I kept walking in that direction. Before long, I reached a business district, though not a wealthy one. This was fortunate, because it had become extremely obvious to me that I needed new clothes, and soon.

While still hidden in the shadows of an alleyway, I replaced my invisibility spell with the glamor I had been wearing earlier, then walked out onto the sidewalk as casually as I could and began strolling along the street, scanning the storefronts. I passed taverns and liquor stores, some cheap eateries, a few shops selling clothing and knickknacks that were closed for the night… until at last I happened upon a secondhand clothing store whose name, spelled out in gaudy neon script above the display window, was “Second Chances.” The irony was not lost on me. I ducked into another small alleyway between the shop and its neighbor, doffed the glamor, then walked in sporting my ridiculous armor and cloak.

I saw what I needed almost immediately. Hanging against the back wall was a long, fitted black leather coat with a high collar, adorned with little brass teeth along all the edges of the leather, from the collar to the hem. I do not entirely know if the analogy of love at first sight is appropriate, since I do not know what it is like to fall in love, at first sight or hundredth; but I felt at once that the coat and I were made for each other.

The clerk behind the sales counter—a tall elderly man with wispy white hair and pale blue eyes—was staring at me in utter bemusement. I decided that boldness was the best strategy; if I approached the situation with an air of confidence and command, perhaps I could bluster my way into getting what I wanted. “I would like that coat,” I said firmly, pointing at it. “Will you take my armor in trade for it? I assure you, it is worth far more.”

The man shook his head, either to say no or to try to clear his fog of confusion; perhaps both. His face hardened; no matter how brazen and outlandish I appeared, he was not going to be blustered out of money. “Does this look like a pawn shop?” he asked indignantly. It took me a moment to interpret the term, but I remembered that in Midgard, people in need of money sometimes _pawned_ their more valuable possessions for quick cash. “The coat is 200 units. I take cash or credit,” the man declared.

“I don’t have units,” I replied, not letting down my air of confidence. “If a pawn shop will take items in trade, where can I find one?”

He blinked, apparently still not sure what to make of me. “Just up the street,” he said, pointing, “then take the second right.”

“Thank you. I will return with cash,” I announced.

I followed the salesman’s directions and found the pawn shop, rather as I had expected, to be a small, dimly lit place with an odd assortment of objects displayed in the window: mostly jewelry; a few watches; a strange porcelain statuette of a creature that I suppose some alien might have considered cute; a hat and stole made of a rich purple fur; even a few small weapons—a hooked knife, a tiny handgun. I strode in, again hoping that my commanding demeanor would work in my favor. A diminutive fellow with wrinkled white skin and four rows of dark hair on his ridged head came forward to greet me. Unlike the clerk at the clothing store, he showed no surprise at all at my strange appearance; a true professional, then. “How may I help you?” he said, rather obsequiously.

“I need to sell my armor,” I told him without hesitation. “How much will you give me for it?”

He looked over the armor, and me, appraisingly. “Will you want to buy it back, sir?”

“No,” I said brusquely. “I don’t care what happens to it.”

He sighed with feigned regret. “I doubt that there’s a market for such a thing. What would I gain if I bought it from you?”

“Someone may be attracted by the novelty,” I replied with a small smile. “If not, it can be taken apart and melted down. The metal on its own is quite valuable: good bronze and steel with gold and silver ornamentation.”

“Hmm,” he said, looking it over again. “I suppose I might be able to give you 300 units for it…”

That was enough to buy the coat, but with very little left over for food and lodging. I knew he was trying to cheat me. I scoffed. “That might be what the gold detailing alone is worth. The whole breastplate can’t be worth less than 800.” I pulled the number out of thin air, but figured it was best to aim high.

The pawnbroker gave me a doubtful look. “But the trouble and expense of having it disassembled and melted down… I suppose I could go up to 450, but…”

I shook my head firmly. “A fair discount for your trouble and expense might bring the price down to 700.”

“With the wrist pieces as well?” he asked, rapid calculations going on behind his eyes.

“No, I’ll keep those.” They were easily concealed, and I wouldn’t mind having the extra protection.

He sighed again, looking very put-upon. “I can give you 600, sir, but I’m afraid that’s my final offer.”

“Six hundred it is, then,” I answered. That would leave me with 400 units to spend on food and shelter while I figured out my course of action. A thought occurred to me, and I added, “If you’ll throw in a coin purse, or some way to carry the cash.”

“Very well, sir,” the pawnbroker replied. While I undid the straps on the sides of my breastplate, he walked over to a shelf and retrieved a small leather object, then opened a drawer attached to a machine on his desk and pulled out six rectangular slips of paper. I pulled the breastplate off over my head, and my cloak, no longer secured to my shoulders, fell and pooled around my feet.

“Will you be selling that as well, sir?” the pawnbroker asked politely, eyeing the rich fabric of the cloak.

“No,” I replied somewhat coldly. It would at least be useful as a blanket; and I was already envisioning modifications I could make to my new leather coat, perhaps sewing fabric from my cloak into the lining to echo the green of my tunic. Even in exile, I intended to maintain my distinctive style; that, at least, was something I could still take pride in.

“Very good,” he said, looking somewhat disappointed as I handed over the breastplate, still attached to the bronze and silver plates that guarded my upper arms and the leather panels trimmed with gold leaf that covered the sides of my legs. He put it down behind his desk, then handed me the six slips of paper, each of which had a picture of a woman’s face and the number “100” inked on, and the leather object, which turned out to be a slim rectangular pouch that folded into a compact square. I was puzzled at first by the paper, until I recalled that many Midgardian nations also used paper notes as currency in lieu of metal coins. I wasn’t entirely sure what to do with the pouch, though, and my confusion must have shown on my face. Gently, and without remark, the pawnbroker took the items from my hands, unfolded the pouch, slid the papers into it, then folded it over again and handed it back to me, saying with slight emphasis and not a shadow of irony, “Your _wallet,_ sir.”

I slipped the wallet into a pocket in my tunic that I sometimes used as a sheath for one of my throwing knives, then stooped to gather up my cloak. I took the time to fold it up somewhat neatly.

“Thank you for your business, sir,” the pawnbroker said unctuously, bowing me out the door. “I do hope you’ll come again.”

 _I hope I’ll never have to,_ I thought as I walked briskly back down the street toward the clothing shop. The clerk seemed surprised to see me again, and even a bit impressed. I took two of the slips of paper (the word _banknotes_ drifted into my head from somewhere in the past, and then, from more recently, _bills)_ from my wallet and held them out to him. “I would still like to buy that coat.”

Strangely, the man did not take the money right away. “Wouldn’t you like to try it on first?”

Silently, I placed the money on his table and put my wallet back in my pocket. I followed the man across the room; he took the coat off its hanger and held it out for me to put my arms in the sleeves, almost as one of my servants might have done in Asgard. He pointed to a full-length mirror on the adjacent wall, and I turned to face it. The long, slender coat looked sleek and fierce, as I had anticipated. I ran my hands along the edges that came together in the front, looking for a fastening mechanism, but found none.

“How does it close?” I asked him, feeling like an idiot but still trying to sound as confident as possible. “I cannot find any buttons or buckles or…”

The man’s look of bemusement took on a touch of humor, and pity. “It’s a zipper.”

I was completely lost. “A what?”

Shaking his head, the amusement on his face growing, the man approached to take the bottom of the coat in his hands. The memory of my earlier hostile encounter was still fresh in my mind, and I flinched away instinctively from even this completely innocuous contact.

“Hold still,” the man said with a strange gentleness. He latched a metal tab on one side of the coat into the notch of some small mechanism on the other, then slid the mechanism up the length of the coat; where it passed, the brass teeth on the inside edges locked into each other. They were functional, then, not merely ornamental, like the ones on the collar and the hem. _Very clever,_ I thought. “I see,” was all I said.

The man stepped back and continued to look at me strangely, but now the pity was overtaking the bemusement. “Where you from, then?” he asked, kindly.

“Nowhere,” I said. It was true, in a way.

The man looked puzzled. “Knowhere? The mining colony?” He furrowed his brow, thinking. “You one of the Tivan kids?”

“What?” Clearly he had not interpreted my statement as I had intended. “No, I meant… I’m not from anywhere.”

He gave me a knowing smile. “I get that you don’t want to tell anyone—you don’t want anyone to drag you back home. I know the look of a runaway.”

 _A runaway?_ Did I look that young to him? That lost and pathetic and frightened? I opened my mouth to protest, but he held up his hands and said, “Don’t worry, I won’t tell on you. I know with lots of kids… what they run into might be bad, but what they’re running away from is worse.”

Embarrassingly, I felt the sting of tears in my eyes, both at his unexpected kindness and at the memories stirred by his words. I swallowed hard, cleared my throat, and lied, “I’m not running away from anything. But I thank you for your help. Might I ask you for a bit more help still?”

“Sure, kid,” he said, giving a small disbelieving shake of his head.

“I need to find safe but inexpensive lodgings for a few days. Can you tell me where I might be able to find such a thing?”

“Of course,” he answered. “Back up the street in the direction I sent you before, there’s a place called the Haven Inn. I know the owner; she sees a lot of kids like you. It’s 40 units a night, but she’ll take what you can pay if you wash some dishes and change some sheets to make up the rest.”

I thanked him, then headed up the street toward the inn. That man at the aptly named secondhand clothing store was the first and one of the last to show me true, unlooked-for kindness during my sojourn in foreign regions of space.

On my way to the inn, I stopped at a small eatery like the ones I had seen before and bought a concoction of meat and vegetables flavored with strange spices, wrapped in a thin bread. I hadn’t realized until I took the first bite how ravenous I was. I ate as I walked, dripping the flavorful sauce everywhere; fortunately, I was able to use seiðr to clean it off my hands and coat. I found the inn, and took a room for the night. The room was spare, containing nothing but a bed, a small desk, a chair, and some kind of visual entertainment device that vaguely resembled what Midgardians call a _television._ The bed was hard and lumpy, and would have been difficult to sleep on if I hadn’t been so exhausted. I only bothered to pull off one of my boots before I collapsed on the bed and fell asleep.

But I was awakened a few hours later by unquiet dreams. I dreamed of my brother—my not-brother—confronting me in the Bifröst’s Observatory as branches of ice spread across the walls. But in my dream, he threatened me with Mjölnir while still in human form, the wounds from the Destroyer’s fist gaping red and angry across his face and chest. The icy tendrils reached out to ensnare me, their uncanny chill turning my skin blue and lined and my eyes demonic red, so that Thor could see the monster I really was; and he raised his hammer to strike me down with the same reckless joy he had shown during the battle on Jötunheim. I dreamed of once more striking Laufey—my father, my true father—with a blast from Gungnir; but just as I delivered the killing blow, he turned into Odin, the man who had called himself my father. “No, Loki,” he said as the blast of light reached him—not a desperate cry, not a plea, but a quiet disappointed sigh. “No, Loki,” he said again and again as I let go of the staff and fell into airless space…

I opened my eyes, gasping and sweating, and struggled to remember where I was. The Haven Inn, on a little planet somewhere in the Nova Empire. I was still bone-tired, but I feared that going back to sleep would plunge me back into those awful dreams, so instead I sat up against the headboard of the bed to contemplate my situation, and my course of action. My first priority was survival, and for that I needed money. I had never needed to worry about money before: as a prince of Asgard, most of my needs were met without my ever having to consider how they were paid for—food came from the palace kitchens, raiment from the palace tailors, weapons from the palace armorers—and for the rest, my royal parents supplied their sons with as much cash as we might need to purchase something that caught our fancy.

The first thought that came to mind was to try to find work. Although I was unfamiliar with the customs in this part of the universe, I did not lack skills. I was well-educated in science and mathematics; but I realized that my distinctively Asgardian understanding of these subjects might be a hindrance rather than a help, and—worse still—might betray my identity. Very well: I was not above resorting to manual labor; while I was not especially strong by Asgardian standards, my strength would appear exceptional to most other beings. But a difficulty soon occurred to me: if I were to seek legitimate work, I would surely be expected to provide personal information—a name, a birthdate, a place of residence, a record of education and employment. I could no doubt invent an identity for myself; but I recalled from my boyhood lessons on foreign governments that the Nova Empire had a thorough and sophisticated bureaucracy. If anyone cared to look into the details I provided, they could easily determine that they were all lies. That in itself was not necessarily a problem: if an employer discovered that my identity was false, I could simply disappear, and invent a new identity somewhere else. The thought that filled me with cold, nauseating dread was that someone might discover my true identity. And of course, if they did, they would be obliged to report it to the Nova Corps, who would then make contact with the King of Asgard. I desperately wanted Asgard, and especially my erstwhile family, to continue believing that I was dead. It was infinitely better for all of us.

I told myself that even if my false identity were uncovered, it was extremely unlikely that anyone would be able to figure out who I really was. But what finally pushed me onto the path that I eventually took was the thought that I could never make anything of myself if I were constantly drifting from place to place, taking odd jobs and trying to keep running ahead of being found out. However, I realized (my old ambition resurfacing), I could leverage my unique skills to achieve success in less respectable occupations. In the criminal world, moreover, no one would ask or care who I had been; the new identity I invented would be a true one, because it would be made up solely of my deeds in this new world, divorced entirely from my past. Though my motives may not have been entirely transparent to me at the time, I freely admit now that my desire for power and influence was what drove me into my brief career in the criminal underworld of the Andromeda Galaxy.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, it's the Broker and some of the Ravagers from _Guardians of the Galaxy!_ More cameos to come. I'm not sure if my depictions of the various business transactions are realistic at all, but... I did my best.
> 
> So... the idea for this story actually started with wondering where Loki got that sweet new outfit that he shows up with at the beginning of _The Avengers,_ given that he was wearing his kind of lame formal armor when he fell at the end of _Thor._ Sorry if there's too much discussion of clothing, but I get the sense that Loki cares a lot about what he wears.
> 
> Please leave comments! Comments are awesome. Even if there was something you didn't like -- style, content, pacing -- please let me know.


	3. The Pirate King

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loki makes his way into the criminal world of the Andromeda Galaxy, makes some sacrifices for his career, gains a certain amount of notoriety, and receives an invitation from the Other.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As one reader (CanIHaveAHug) commented, I end up glossing over a lot of Loki's criminal career in the Andromeda Galaxy. Sorry about that; it's largely because I have no idea how a criminal underworld would actually operate, and I'm not at all confident about the interactions that I do describe. Maybe I'll flesh out this section later, or write a couple associated one-shots about his adventures.
> 
>  **Chapter-specific warnings:** allusions to dubiously consensual sexual activity.

My criminal enterprises started small.  I emptied the cash drawers of shops in various parts of the town where I had landed, using my abilities to become invisible, create simulacra, and assume the appearance of others that I had seen (though of course I had to be careful not to let anyone touch either my simulacra or myself while I was wearing a glamor, lest it dissolve before someone’s eyes and give away my game).  Once I had honed my strategy, I could move on to stealing items that were worth more than the amount of cash any shop kept on its premises at a given time.  In the meantime, I used my takings to continue paying for food and lodging.  If the owner of the Haven Inn wondered where I got the money, she did not let on.  I got the sense that she was accustomed to not asking questions.

Before I could progress to more ambitious heists, I needed to locate a buyer for stolen goods, one who would not look too closely into their provenance.  I suspected that the pawnbroker who had bought my armor might be the kind of person I needed, but I had to spend some time spying on him (while invisible, of course) to make sure.  My suspicions were confirmed over the course of the next couple of weeks, as I watched him purchase valuable items not only from shabby, desperate-looking people pawning their last belongings, but also from rougher individuals, some of whom came around more than once.  Some, I noticed, were dressed in suits of the same reddish leather as the ruffians who had attacked me that first night.  Professional thieves, I guessed: pirates.  Well, I could play the same game.

I put this new intelligence into use about two weeks after I arrived.  I had stolen a necklace of precious gems from a jewelry store on the other side of town (which is to say, the reputable side).  It was relatively modest as valuable jewelry went, since this was clearly a small city on a small outpost of the Empire (a moon, as it turned out); it was priced at 1500 units.  In the urban centers of Xandar, no doubt, I could find jewels worth ten times as much.  But reselling jewelry on the black market was not the goal; I needed to demonstrate to the broker that I had the skills to procure valuable items, so that he would give me the leads to pursue objects that were worth far more in illicit trade.

When I walked into the pawn shop, the broker was bent over his desk doing some calculations in a ledger.  I strode up to the desk and laid the necklace in front of the ledger without a word.  The broker made a point of continuing to write for a few moments before looking at the necklace, then up at me.  He gave his usual obsequious smile and said, “How nice to see you again, sir.”  I knew he would recognize me; I doubted that he ever forgot a face.

“I have something to sell,” I said, not bothering with pleasantries.

“Yes, I see,” he replied, picking up the necklace and making a show of examining it.  “How curious—I’ve seen one very like it for sale elsewhere in town.”

“Similar, perhaps.  This one is quite old, however.”  I knew that he knew I was lying.

“Belonged to your mother, did it?” he asked, feigning kindly interest.  I was impressed that, as always, not a hint of irony crept into his voice.

“My grandmother,” I answered.

“Will you want to buy it back, sir?” he asked, almost ritualistically.

“No.”

“Hmm.  I’m not sure that I could sell it here, given that one could find something so similar nearby…” he said doubtfully.  What he meant, of course, was  _given that it could be so easily identified as stolen._

“Perhaps you have contacts elsewhere in the galaxy, where such a thing would not be so easy to find,” I suggested.

The broker scrutinized me over his spectacles.  I gazed back impassively.

“Indeed I do,” he said at last.

“Is there something in particular for which you know you could find a market?” I asked.

He narrowed his eyes.  “If you come to bring me another item of yours, perhaps I’ll have thought of something by then.”

A test, then.  He wanted to make sure my skills were reliable before sending me after anything in particular.

“Will you buy this, or should I take it somewhere else?” I asked, nodding toward the necklace.  He must have known I didn’t have anywhere else to take it.

“I suppose I can give you 500 units for it,” he said graciously.

“It’s worth 1500,” I pointed out.  He raised his eyebrows at how close I was coming to breaking out of our careful dance of pretense.  I didn’t flinch.

“Perhaps, but considering how easy it is to find something just like it… I can manage 700.”

“One thousand.”

“Eight hundred is the most I can give you.”  I took it as a pledge of his willingness to continue doing business.

Over the course of the next week I brought the pawnbroker a small handgun much like the one I had seen in his window, as well as a ring set with a large brilliant gem.  Each time, I asked if there was something he knew he had a market for, and he said he might have thought of something by the next time I came.  These were merely ploys to buy time, however, because I had my sights set on something more impressive.

In the wealthier part of town there was a small art museum, which I visited several times under different glamors to determine which of its possessions attracted the most interest.  I identified a painting that was several centuries old, depicting a woman with pink skin and pale hair in a state of partial undress, around which museum traffic was directed; it appeared to be the jewel of the little museum’s collection.  I made myself invisible and stayed past the museum’s closing time for several days to observe the appearances and behavior of the curators.  Finally, after a week of this kind of surveillance, I executed my plan.  I slipped an emetic into one of the tea of one of the curators to make sure that she was indisposed; and then, at closing time, I cast a glamor over myself to adopt her appearance, disabled the alarms in the museum, and took the painting into a back room as if to clean it.  Fortunately, no one else was there, so I didn’t have to pretend to know how to clean a painting while waiting for them to leave.  I removed a small sensor from the back of the frame, then stowed the painting in a pocket dimension like the one where I keep my spare throwing knives, and walked out the back door.

That same evening, I went back to the pawn shop with my hands empty.  The broker seemed puzzled when I didn’t immediately put anything down on the desk in front of him.  Good; I was going for a dramatic effect when I seemingly pulled the painting out of thin air.  It was hard for me to suppress a little smirk when his mouth opened slightly in amazement that he wasn’t quick enough to conceal.

“So,” I said, setting the painting on the desk atop his open ledger.  “Have you thought of something I might be able to find for you?”

The broker closed his mouth and cleared his throat, recovering quickly from his surprise.  “I believe I have,” he replied.  His usual obsequious air was replaced by a more business-like manner.  “Let me put this somewhere safe until we can discuss payment.”  He picked up the painting and disappeared into a back room.  When he emerged, he was holding what looked like a black leather glove.  “This,” he said, “is a rather rare weapon.  They are not made anymore, and I’m afraid their possession is not quite…”

“Legal?” I finished for him.

His slightly discomfited reaction to my bluntness made me think of a bird with ruffled feathers.  “Yes, well.  To be perfectly frank about it.”

He turned the glove over so that I could see a silver button in the middle of the palm.  “It is operated by pressing this button, which can be concealed like so.”  He pulled a flap of black leather over the button; after he smoothed it down, it stayed closed.  He turned the glove so that I could see three small, apparently decorative silver buttons on the inside of the wrist.  “These control how long one must depress the trigger to fire the weapon.  This one sets it at five seconds—this one at three seconds—this one at two seconds.  Of course, the shorter the time setting, the easier it is to fire in a hurry…”

“…but the greater the danger of setting it off by accident.  I can see why this is illegal.”

“But it is in high demand in certain circles where… discreetness is valued.”

“Yes, I can see why that would be the case as well.”  I took the glove gingerly and examined its details. 

“And you want me to find another one of these.”

“More would be preferable,” the broker said primly.

“And where might I find one or more such unusual items?”

He reached into a drawer and slid across the table a small card of some translucent material printed with the name of a business—the Andromeda—with an abstract yet clearly erotic sketch of a woman lying chained on a rock.  When the angle of the light on the drawing shifted, she seemed to writhe and struggle in a most suggestive way.  Of course: Andromeda was the Midgardian name for the galaxy we were in; and the drawing was a reference to the Andromeda of Greek myth, who was chained to a rock as a sacrifice to a sea monster, then rescued by the hero Perseus.  Below the sketch, in smaller print, were four names that I took to be locations when I saw that Xandar City was one of them.

“The Andromeda is a… a leisure establishment frequented by members of an… unofficial organization rumored to be in possession of a number of them.”  I suppressed the urge to snort at his euphemistic turns of phrase.

“So you want me to infiltrate this… what, this lounge full of gangsters, and…”

“I believe _club_ is a more appropriate term,” the broker said stiffly.

“…and trace their supply chain for these illegal weapons.”

“That’s about the size of it, yes.”

I gave him a smile that must have looked somewhat manic, judging from the brief flash of alarm in his eyes, and said, “Done.”

* * *

That was the first of many such errands I was sent on, first by this broker and later by others.  The details of my escapades over the next nine months would probably fill a book, and I can’t imagine that you want to hear all of them now.  Some other time, perhaps.

Suffice it to say that I constantly found myself in difficult and dangerous situations that all my youthful experience of battle could not have prepared me for.  I cannot count the number of times that I nearly lost my life, and not in the ways I was accustomed to expecting—to the sword of a foe I fought face-to-face, or an arrow from across a battlefield—but to a knife held to my throat in a dark alleyway, or pushed into my ribs by someone pressed next to me in a crowd; to poison slipped into a drink or a strangler’s thread pulled across my throat from behind.  I came away from many of these encounters with scars that it would not be entirely appropriate to show you.  Of necessity, my ability to fight with daggers at close range improved markedly.  Perhaps I could count the number of people I killed, either in self-defense or in pursuit of some item of value, but I have not bothered.  On several occasions—five, I think; no, six—I seduced someone for information, or for access to a sought-after object: four women and two men.  In half those cases, more accurately, I allowed them to believe they had seduced me…

What, wouldn’t anyone do the same?  No?  I just told you I didn’t keep track of how many people I killed, and _this_ is the thing that shocks you?  Using seduction as a strategy was my broker’s idea; I doubt it would ever have occurred to me independently.  We had traced some object to its most recent owner, a middle-aged widow living on a planet not far from Xandar, but then the trail had gone cold; all our informants agreed that she no longer had it, but no one knew whom she had sold it to, or where.

“It looks like there’s nothing left but to ask her,” I jested to the Broker (as I came to refer to the pawnbroker who gave me my first commission; I never asked his name, as he never asked mine). 

“You could,” he said thoughtfully, as if I had been entirely serious.

I sighed, exasperated.  “And how would I do that, exactly?” 

He shrugged.  “You could always seduce her,” he remarked, for once dispensing with his habitual euphemisms.

I was taken entirely by surprise; as I said, I never would have thought of that myself.  “Are you certain that would work?” I said doubtfully.

“Fairly certain,” he replied, giving me an appraising scan with his eyes, as if I were an artifact whose authenticity he was verifying.

I understood the significance of that look.  I had been aware since my youth that other people—both women and men—often found me sexually attractive, despite my almost complete lack of interest in such things.  I had used it to my advantage in the past, but never in quite this way.  I sighed again, feeling somewhat put-upon, but resigned myself to the necessity of the sacrifice.  In that line of work, after all, one must sometimes get one’s hands dirty, among other things.

I had to do a bit of research before I attempted it; the deception I was weaving would have unraveled instantly if the charismatic seducer I was portraying revealed himself to be an unskilled lover.  I sought advice, and some practical training, from a talented, much-desired Krylorian courtesan (or “escort,” as they said on Xandar; apparently everyone here shared the Broker’s penchant for euphemism).  I had come to her before for rather different sorts of information; she was an excellent source of intelligence on what the Broker (in typical euphemistic fashion) referred to as “the high-end community.”  I was, as in most pursuits, a quick study; my instructor remarked that since I was a complete novice, I must have had a fair amount of natural talent.  “Such a waste,” she said flirtatiously as I zipped up my coat on the way out.

No, I didn’t enjoy exercising that particular skill; I found it generally tedious, frequently disgusting, sometimes even painful.  One of the men whom I allowed to “seduce” me—an obscenely wealthy industrialist who I’m not certain would have even recognized the word “no” had I uttered it in earnest—turned out to be a bit of a sadist, which I hadn’t entirely been bargaining for.  But that is not a tale for the weak of stomach, and one that I would require a great deal more wine to be willing to tell.  What’s that Midgardian expression—“close your eyes and think of England”?  For most of my life I expected that I would eventually have to close my eyes and think of Asgard in some arranged marriage of political convenience.  In this case it was, rather, close your eyes and think of your goal—of power, of renown.  Think of the ladder you’re climbing and don’t look down.

I gradually expanded my network of contacts, until eventually I had buyers and informants on half the inhabited planets of the Nova Empire, and a few within the Kree Empire as well.  At least partly thanks to my assistance, my original broker relocated to Xandar to improve his business prospects, which had the side effect of improving my business prospects as well.  And I made something of a name for myself—several names, actually.

Stories accumulated about a man (though some said a woman) of unknown origin who could accomplish impossible feats of stealth and deception.  Some called him “the Magician,” a name I tried to discourage where possible; I didn’t want it widely known, or even suspected, that magic was, in fact, the explanation for these remarkable feats.

Some people actually referred to him as “the Pirate King.”  I laughed uproariously when I first heard that name, while drinking with a couple of associates—curiously enough, a talking raccoon and a walking tree who could by courtesy be said to talk (the All-Tongue allowed me to understand his meaning, but he only ever uttered three words in Xandarian)—whom I half-trusted.  (I never fully trusted anyone, and I still do not; though I can usually predict their behavior, which is somewhat different.)  I explained to my puzzled companions that I had once seen a musical play in Midgard—or “on Terra,” as I told them—“The Pirates of Somewhere-or-Other,” in which the leader of the pirates sings a song about how “it is, it is a glorious thing to be a Pirate King.”  (I did not tell them _when_ I saw the play: just before the turn of the twentieth century—rightly called _la belle époque;_ ah, people knew how to dress then!)

My preferred epithet, though, which I used whenever talking about this mysterious figure with people who did not know his identity, was “the Trickster.”  It reminded me of my youthful exploits in Midgard, when I was a capricious god who commanded the awe and terror of mortals.

Although there were few people who could have matched any of those names with my face, I nonetheless made an effort to look the part of the legendary Trickster or the Pirate King (that name still makes me chuckle).  As I had planned, I had a tailor sew fabric from my old cloak into the lining of my coat; while I was at it, I asked her to cut the skirt of the coat into panels for greater ease of movement.  Once I had acquired more wealth and connections, I was able to commission a new black leather tunic and trousers much like the ones I had favored in Asgard, and have my coat further modified to resemble my old one (removing the sleeves; adding broad leather shoulder panels to deflect blows).  I had the fortune to stumble across a single pauldron that had once been part of a suit of traditional Kree armor, and I was so taken with the ancient design that I decided to start wearing it instead of trying to sell it, and even had my own vambraces engraved with matching patterns.  I allowed my hair to grow long and wild, perhaps to make myself appear more roguish and fearsome.

So much for the tale of how I survived my fall, and the source of my stylish attire.  It remains to tell why I ended up on Earth looking like death, which is far less entertaining.  Indeed, aside from the few minutes I spent in empty space before I landed on that little moon, I do not really think of the time I have described hitherto as having been spent “in the Void.”  I did not truly descend into the Void until nine months after I let myself fall from the remains of the Bifrost into that tear in space.

At the time, I relished the measure of notoriety I had managed to attain; it was, after all, the reason I had decided to embark upon a daring life of crime rather than lying low and slinking from one odd job to another.  I might have guessed that gaining notoriety might draw the _wrong_ kind of attention as well; but aside from a constant low-level concern about being stabbed in the back, the only thing I truly feared was that someone might discover my identity and reveal my whereabouts to the King of Asgard.

So I was afraid for all the wrong reasons when, after tendering the expected payment for a treasure I had acquired, the Broker informed me that a strange individual had come in, inquiring after me.  Or rather, he said, after “the Asgardian.”  My stomach clenched; my face felt cold and numb, as if I might vomit, and I knew I must have turned even paler than usual.

Trying to conceal my rising panic, I asked, as calmly as I could, “What did this individual look like?”

“He—I assume it was a ‘he’—wore a dark hooded cloak and some sort of gilded mask over his face.  But under the mask his face looked—very strange.  He had rather, er, sharp teeth, and appeared to have two thumbs… on each hand.”

I let the breath I had been holding slowly ease out, trying not to give an audible sigh of relief.  Not an agent of Asgard, then.

“He left a message for you,” the Broker continued.  He handed me a business card—exactly like the one he had given me when he sent me on my first errand; I instantly recognized the sketch of the chained woman, her features undefined but her pose clearly suggestive.  _Curious,_ I thought.  Where the Andromeda’s locations were listed, “Xandar City” was circled.  I turned the card over and saw written on the back, in an elegant hand, the next day’s date, followed by “3 rd floor.  11pm” (or the rough equivalent in the Xandarian time-keeping system).  An invitation to a meeting, then.  That was not out of the ordinary, and the location was a public one, so I saw no reason to be especially apprehensive.  I would be on my guard, of course, but that was no different than usual.

My broker looked unusually nervous, however.  “Are you going to meet him, then?” he asked, trying to evince idle curiosity.  But it was extremely odd for him to inquire into affairs of mine that did not directly concern him.  I raised my eyes from the card and looked at him sharply.  “Why not?”

The Broker shrugged, not as casually as he intended.  “I would simply urge caution.  There was something very strange about that person.”

“Other than the extra thumbs?”

He gave a small polite laugh.

“I will be as cautious as I always am,” I said firmly.  “Enough that I don’t get killed, not so much that I don’t get paid.”

“Of course, sir,” the Broker said obligingly.  _“Sir”?_ He hadn’t addressed me that way since he sent me on my first errand for him.  Was he expressing hostility, or some sort of strange affection?

“Are you _worried_ about me?” I asked, incredulous.

He looked taken aback.  “Of course I would not presume—I am quite certain you have matters well in hand…”

“Which I do,” I broke in.  “Thank you for conveying the message.”

“No trouble, no trouble at all.”

Turning to leave, I pulled my wallet out from one of the pockets of my coat and slid the card from the Andromeda into it.  The wallet was the same one the Broker had given me at our first meeting, when I sold my armor.  As I looked at it, a question occurred to me, and I turned back around when I was halfway to the door.

“How long have you known that I am—from Asgard?”  I couldn’t bring myself to say _Asgardian;_ it did not feel true.

Surprised by the question, the Broker opened his mouth for a moment without speaking, then said a bit hurriedly, “I began to suspect it when you pulled that painting out of the air.  Your many impressive accomplishments since then have only tended to confirm my suspicions.”

I could not have said how, but I knew he was lying.  Call it an instinct; I lie often enough myself that I have a sense for when others do it.  I searched his face for a long moment, then said, “No.  You’ve known since you first saw me.”

The Broker’s eyes widened and he opened his mouth to protest, but I cut him off with a wolfish smile.  “When I sold you my armor, you knew where it was from, and what it would be worth to the right buyer.  Oh, you made a tidy profit off that, didn’t you?  You could have sold it for, what, a million?  ‘I doubt that there’s a market for such a thing’… What brazen horseshit!”

Terrified, the Broker was shaking his head vehemently, insisting, “Of course not!”

I laughed a little wildly, letting him panic a moment longer, then broke into a broad grin.  “Well played, sir,” I said, making a show of magnanimity.  “The Trickster tricked.  I can appreciate a good con, even if I’m the target.”

The Broker fell silent, his mouth hanging open slightly.  After a moment, he ventured a nervous smile, as if he still wasn’t sure whether I was toying with him.  “I—I was just doing my job, sir.”

“Of course.   A true professional, as always,” I remarked with a gracious smile.  It was, in fact, the first thing I had observed about him.

“Thank you, sir.  It has been an immense privilege to work with you.”  His manner was less obsequious than the words might have suggested; I might even have said he sounded sincere.  I was puzzled by the strange formality, and finality, with which he was speaking.  Apparently he had a premonition, or simply guessed, that this was the last time he would see me.

I had no such premonition.  “Remember that you said that the next time I come up empty-handed,” I quipped as I walked out the door.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I did say there would be more cameos...
> 
> I hope someone appreciated the _Pirates of Penzance_ joke. I was, of course, also paying homage to Tom Hiddleston's remarks that between _Thor_ and _The Avengers,_ Loki has transitioned from "lost Asgardian prince" to "Asgardian pirate." Plus, I just know Loki would love the turn-of-the-century _"belle epoque"_ as much as I do. I mean, just look at those suits he wears on Earth.
> 
> Speaking of which, [here's](https://alicedesigned.wordpress.com/2014/01/06/costume-design-appreciation-marvels-loki-laufeyson/) where I got all the details on Loki's spectacular costume change between _Thor_ and _The Avengers._ Enjoy, if you're as obsessed with his outfits as I am.
> 
> Again, please leave comments if you like, or don't like, what I'm doing!
> 
> P.S., on the topic of associated one-shots, I think I'm going to write a story that juxtaposes Loki's first (unsuccessful) sexual experience, when Thor decides it's time to take him to a brothel, with his lesson from the Krylorian escort. Watch this space.


	4. The Mad Titan

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loki has a meeting with the Other, who makes him an offer that he quite literally can't refuse, and is captured by Thanos.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I borrowed an idea from [TheOtherOdinson](http://archiveofourown.org/users/TheOtherOdinson/pseuds/TheOtherOdinson) (more specifically, from [this post](http://theotherodinson.tumblr.com/post/120317046824/since-i-just-reblogged-a-manip-of-it-au-where)) regarding Thanos messing with Loki by making him shift into his Jotun form, but I interpreted it slightly differently.
> 
>  **Chapter-specific warning:** psychological torture.

The Andromeda was a gleaming four-story building, its exterior made from a material that resembled white marble, in a part of Xandar City that was largely devoted to nighttime recreation.  The first floor was an ordinary nightclub, albeit a selective and fashionable one, with a bar against one wall and an expanse of empty floor where the beautiful, wealthy, intoxicated youth of the city danced (if those unmistakably sexual gyrating motions could be called dancing) to the percussive pulsing of what might loosely be termed music.  The promoters who sorted the wheat from the chaff among the many revelers who lined up at the door, and the bouncers who checked identification, let me enter without hindrance; they knew me and anticipated generous tips at the end of the night.  I passed without incident through a weapons detector at the door—one of many advantages to keeping knives in interdimensional storage.  I navigated my way across the dance floor to the stairs with greater ease than usual; it was still early in the evening, and the night’s activities would not begin in earnest until at least three hours later.

The second floor consisted of a sort of round balcony, with another bar against the wall and some small tables and chairs positioned around a circular opening in the floor that allowed customers to overlook the dancers below.  I passed by these as well, and climbed the stairs to the third floor.  I was greeted by another bouncer, whose elegant dress and courteous demeanor made him seem more like a butler; but I knew better than to underestimate his strength of arm and will.  “Do you have an appointment or a reservation, sir?” he asked politely.

“I’m here to meet someone,” I said.  I took my wallet from my pocket and withdrew the card with the meeting time and location written on the back and showed it to him.  I was mildly impressed but not entirely surprised when he seemed to recognize the handwriting, and a look of apprehension crossed his face.  “Let me verify that,” he said, taking the card, and disappeared around a corner.  He did not leave the door unguarded, however; as soon as he left, another similarly dressed bouncer emerged from beside the door, and regarded me with a polite smile and a warning look in his eyes.  I returned both.

The first bouncer returned, looking even more nervous than he had before, despite the smile that persisted on his face.  “Please follow me, sir,” he said, the smile starting to look somewhat frozen.

I followed him past the grand staircase that faced the door and led up to the fourth floor, which I had never seen.  He opened the door to what looked like a restaurant, quiet and dimly lit, with small booths and round tables surrounded by luxurious leather seats recessed into alcoves so that patrons could converse in privacy and comfort.  Well-dressed people with an air of self-importance—business executives, politicians, crime lords, high-class escorts like my Krylorian tutor—sat at some of these tables, sipping drinks of various exotic colors from small crystal glasses.  At a small bar in the back of the room, a bartender with green skin and small horns protruding from his forehead deftly poured two cocktails from shakers into frosted glasses.

I was led to a booth in the far corner of the room, where the strange individual that the Broker had described was sitting on the bench against the wall.  Although he had been sitting indoors for some time, he had not taken off the hood of his cloak.  His eyes were hidden in its shadows, but through the lattice of the golden mask I could see an eerie white face, a flat nose like a dog’s but without a snout, thin wrinkled lips that parted to reveal pointed teeth, as red as if he had just bitten into bloody flesh.  His face unnerved me even when I first saw it, though I had little idea of what I should fear; now it still leers into my nightmares.

I thanked the bouncer before I sat down; he gave a small bow and hurried back to his post.  I slid onto the bench across from the Other (that is the only name I know him by; I cannot think of another title suited to his role, nor do I wish to try).  I gave him an easy, confident smile, hoping to conceal the apprehension and the mild disgust that his appearance provoked in me.  He did not smile back.

“You are the one they call the Trickster?” he began imperiously.  At least it wasn’t the Magician—or the Pirate King.

“Some do call me that, yes,” I replied casually.

“My master has a proposal for you.  A task.  Your reputation suggests that you may be equal to it.”

 _‘Master’?  Not ‘employer’?_ I thought.  _Odd._

A waiter came up to the table and asked if we wanted any drinks.  I ordered the Xandarian equivalent of a beer; it had practically no effect on me, but I found that I put my clients more at ease if I was drinking.  The Other also ordered a drink, one that I was not familiar with.

“What is this task that your… master proposes?” I asked after the waiter left.

“He wishes you to retrieve an object of great value.”

“That is what I do for a living,” I said lightly, suppressing my impatience.  “What is the object in question?”

“I cannot tell you until you agree to the proposal.”

His response was irritating, but not completely out of the ordinary; I had had clients who did not wish to reveal what they were looking for until I was already under contract.  “Very well.  _Where_ is the object in question—or is it part of my task to find out?”

“It is on Terra.  What you might call Earth.  Or—Midgard.”

At that moment I knew the answer was no.  “I’m afraid I can’t go to Terra,” I said, masking with a tone of calm regret the jolt of terror I had felt at the thought of going where Heimdall would see me—and Odin would send someone to retrieve me, no doubt to bring me to justice for my crimes.

“Because it is within the Nine Realms under the dominion of Asgard.”  It was not a question.

“Because long space flights make me ill,” I replied mildly.  I doubted that he would buy the excuse; let him take it as a joke, if he was capable of humor.

“You would not be traveling on a spaceship.”  Apparently humor was not in his repertoire.

At that moment the waiter returned with our drinks.  Whatever the Other had ordered was bright blue, and came as an inch of liquid in a small tumbler, like whiskey.  I considered making a toast, as was customary in Asgard—probably just the formulaic “To your health”—but he had already taken a sip of his drink, so I dispensed with the toast and simply took a draught of my own.

“You have not asked what your payment would be for retrieving this object from Earth,” the Other said silkily.

The answer would still be no, regardless of what he said, but I thought I might as well humor him.  “Very well.  What would my payment be?”

“Earth.”

For a few moments I waited for him to elaborate.  He did not.  “You would give me a planet?  How?  By putting my name on the deed?”  I could no longer hold back the sarcasm, imprudent as it was.

“We would give you an opportunity to conquer and rule it.”  The Other’s tone was sharp, almost a snarl; he was not amused by my impudence.

I felt my old ambition stirring in response to his words, but the fear of being dragged back to Asgard was far stronger.  “The offer is tempting,” I said truthfully, “but I’m not certain Earth works that way.  It has never been united under a single ruler.  Even Odin only brought a small region under his direct control…”  I stopped.  I was sounding like an older version of myself: the eager student, proving to Thor and his friends that _I_ had been paying attention in history and politics lessons, even if they had not.  “And I cannot go there,” I said firmly.

The Other stood and walked around the table.  I was not sure what he was doing; perhaps only preparing to take his leave, since I had turned down his offer, but just in case, I reached mentally for the pocket dimension where I kept my daggers.

Then he pulled from under his cloak a scepter with two cruel curved blades, set with a glowing blue gem, and said, “You don’t actually have a choice in the matter.”  I seized a dagger from its hiding place, but before I had time to do anything with it, the Other pressed the blade of the scepter against my chest.  _This is it,_ I thought briefly, but instead of the tearing pain I expected, my mind went strangely vacant.  My memories of the next few hours are hazy at best.  I was not completely under the Other’s control, as my human servants in Midgard were under mine, but I was not fully myself, either, and I was entirely open to being led out of the club (“My friend is drunk, I’m taking him home,” the Other explained to anyone who looked concerned at my unfocused expression) and eventually to a ship (there are some gaps in my memory regarding exactly how we got there).  The journey to Sanctuary is largely a blank in my mind.

The next thing that I remember at all clearly is waking up in a small cell with walls made of a dark gray metal or stone, with a few cold blue lights around the ceiling and only three thin cracks on one wall outlining where the door would be.  The cell was freezing; it felt almost as cold as the space outside.  _Almost,_ but not quite, I knew, because—as I saw when I glanced down at my white, shaking hands, bound in a pair of dark metal cuffs—I had not shifted into my Jötun form, which my body does automatically to protect itself from tissue damage when it comes into contact with something as cold as the Casket of Ancient Winters, or another Jötun’s skin.  As it was, my Aesir body was shivering violently, and I was losing feeling in my feet.  I tried to tap into my seiðr to warm myself, but the cuffs seemed to block my access to it.

The only thing I could still do against the cold was shift voluntarily into my Jötun form (an ability that is independent of my command of seiðr), and I told myself that would be the wisest thing to do; why would my captors here in this distant galaxy care what alien race of the Nine Realms I belonged to?  But something in my gut resisted the change—shame, disgust, denial.  I rationalized my resistance with the thought that I should not give them any more information about me than they already had, and curled into the smallest ball I could manage in the corner of my cell, tucking my bloodless hands into my coat.

Was I only imagining it, or was the cell growing colder?  I closed my eyes and tucked my head against my knees, still fighting my body’s instinct to shapeshift.  Why was this happening?  Did they know, somehow?  Were they trying to see what I would do?  I bit my lip and my chattering teeth drew blood.  I fought, too, the urge to weep, brought on by the weakness of cold, hunger, and exhaustion; my fury at being captured; my fury with myself for allowing it to happen, and for despising my Jötun body so much that I was unwilling to let it protect me from freezing.  My convulsive shuddering became indistinguishable from sobbing, the watering of my eyes from tears, which froze on my eyelashes.  Eventually, I knew, I would fall asleep, and then my body would take over: it would shift to save my life.  One way or another they would find out, they would see; so why was I waiting until my brain function slowed to the point of unconsciousness?  Was it somehow better if my body did it without my consent?

Anguished, I gritted my teeth and rocked slowly back and forth, half-hoping the movement would stave off the inevitable moment when I lost consciousness.  Vivid in my mind was the memory of the moment when I first had a hint of what I was—when a frost giant grabbed my wrist and instead of searing with frostbite as I had expected, the skin of my arm and hand turned blue and felt suddenly warm, though bare to the frigid air of Jötunheim.  That thrill of shock and horror replayed over and over in my memory as the rest of my thoughts grew quiet.  I saw my hands grasping the Casket and turning blue and lined, felt the rush of sudden warmth throughout my body, heard Odin shout _“Stop!”_ and my own voice, which I could barely stop from shaking with rage and disgust and pain, ask, _“Am I cursed?  What am I?”_ My world narrowed to those two questions, echoing over and over, until I drifted into darkness.

I woke again to the grinding sound of the door sliding open.  I raised my head, opened my eyes still crusted with my frozen tears, and saw first my blue Jötun’s hands, and second, the Other standing in the doorway, holding the scepter he had used to command my obedience.  He smiled unpleasantly.  “So, the Asgardian is not as Asgardian as he might wish to seem.”

Although I was now comfortably warm, I closed my eyes to force the shift back to my Aesir form.  But when he saw my customary pallor begin to creep down my face, the Other _tsk_ ed and, closing in on me, said, “No more lies.  My master will know.”  He touched the scepter gently to my chest again, and I briefly lost control of what I was doing; when he removed it, I was lucid again, but my whole body was warm in a way that could only have resulted from reverting entirely to my Jötun form.  My face grew hot with shame; I wondered if Jötnar could blush.

“My master would have words with you,” the Other continued.  I opened my mouth, searching for something cleverly defiant to say, but he touched my chest with the scepter once more and any thought of disobedience fled my mind.  I stood and followed him unthinkingly.  Again, I have only vague memories of the hallways we walked, the stairs we climbed to the surface of the asteroid and up further still, to a twisted pinnacle of rock where Thanos’s throne stood.

When we stood before the throne, the Other touched me lightly with the scepter, and my mind was my own again.  Thanos’s back was turned to us.  The Other pushed me roughly to my knees, then, keeping his hand heavily on my shoulder, knelt as well.  “My lord,” he said in servile tones, “I have brought you the prisoner.”

“Prisoner?” said a deep, resonant voice.  The throne, floating above the platform where we stood, slowly rotated to face us, and I saw Thanos for the first time: monstrously large, his purple face scored with deep lines, his teeth bared in a smile that was far from welcoming, his eyes glinting with a mad violet light.  “The prince is our guest,” he said mildly, with just the lightest overtone of mocking amusement.

 _Prince?_  Did he know who I was?  How could he know?  I swallowed my rising panic.  “That’s a title I haven’t heard yet,” I said lightly.  “A bit of a demotion from ‘Pirate King.’”

“Come now, Prince Loki,” he said, the soul of reasonableness, “let’s not play games.”

The panic rose again like bile into my throat.  My tongue felt numb and heavy; I opened my mouth, not knowing what I was going to say.

“You’re wondering how I know,” he said in a nauseatingly sympathetic tone.  I said nothing.  “Well, let’s see.  Word gets around the universe that the King of Asgard’s younger son, in a _tragic_ accident, fell to his death from the broken edge of the Bifröst.  That kind of news travels fast and far, you know.  Then I start to hear that there’s a strange young man clawing his way up through the criminal world of the Andromeda Galaxy, doing things no one can do.  It seems he can make himself look like anyone, be in two places at once, even disappear.”

My mouth was dry as parchment, my breath coming fast and shallow.  How could I have been so _stupid?_

Thanos continued mercilessly, leaning forward to fix me with his sly, knowing gaze.  “By his looks, he might be Xandarian, might be Terran, or… might be Asgardian.  Some are calling him the Magician, on account of those uncanny talents.  But some are calling him the _Trickster…_ and that gets me to thinking.  The second prince of Asgard, the one they call the Trickster God, the God of Mischief, falls from the broken Bifröst into a hole in space, and not long after, this magic-wielding Trickster shows up in a distant region of space and starts making mischief… Well, a smart man can put two and two together.  And I am a _very_ smart man.”

I remained silent, knowing that nothing I could say would improve the situation.  I was cursing my foolishness, my hubris, my ambition.  How could I have thought that I would be safe from discovery, that my past would not find me?

Thanos leaned back again, resting his palms on the arms of his throne.  “Of course, it helped that my servant could confirm my guess by reading your mind.  And how _interesting_ when he discovered a few things that weren’t in the news reports: that the second prince of Asgard didn’t so much _fall_ to certain death as _jump,_ and that he isn’t as much ‘of Asgard’ as we thought.”

My heart felt like lead in my chest, pressing down on my stomach; I felt like I couldn’t breathe.  He had read my mind?  How?  That scepter, I realized, the one that could constrain my will.  What else had they seen?

Thanos grinned; it was a hideous sight.  “You’re wondering how much I know about you,” he said, as if he were still reading my thoughts.  “Only what was on the surface of your mind.  You have some impressive walls up, little prince.  But I’ll break them down, never fear.  It will do you no good to lie.”

He leaned forward again.  “So quiet, Silvertongue.”  I flinched, hearing in my head mocking words from what seemed like another life: _“What happened?  Silver tongue turned to lead?”_   “Do you know who I am?”

“No,” I answered.  It came out a hoarse whisper.

“I am Thanos.  Do you know what they call me?”

“Yes.”  My voice was louder, but I could not keep a slight tremor out of it.

“What do they call me, little princeling?”

I found a remaining well of courage somewhere, and met his gaze firmly.  “They call you the Mad Titan,” I said, my voice finally clear and steady.

“And do you know why they call me the Mad Titan?”

“Not exactly,” I said.  “There are various stories, not all of them consistent.”

“You and I have much in common, princeling.  We are both kinslayers.  We have both come close to destroying the world of our birth.”

I continued meeting his gaze unflinchingly, desperate to hide the pain and guilt that flooded in at his words, like blood welling from a reopened wound.

“We are both ruthless in our ambition.  We have both courted death—one of us perhaps more literally than the other,” he said with a strange smile.  This comment puzzled me, but I said nothing.  “I think perhaps we are both mad.  But you are full of guilt and regret and uncertainty.”  I barely managed to suppress a shudder; it was as if he had read my mind again.  “I regret nothing; my aim is clear, and I will stop at nothing to attain it.  Do you understand that _nothing,_ princeling?”

“I think so,” I said quietly.

Thanos chuckled.  “I don’t think you do.  But you will.”

The dread pressing on my chest grew heavier, and breathing evenly became even more difficult.  I focused on returning Thanos’s gaze as if unafraid.

“You still fear madness,” he continued, searching my face with his burning eyes.  “You think it a dangerous weakness.  But I will show you: madness is strength.  It is a danger to others, yes, but not to you.  It is your safety.  It is your _only_ safety.”

I didn’t want to think about what those words meant.  But as Thanos waved me out of his presence and the Other led me back to my cell (without the aid of the scepter this time; he seemed to consider me sufficiently chastened by my audience with the Mad Titan that I would not try anything rash), my mind tormented me with what seemed the only possible meaning: that he was planning some torture so horrific that the only way to withstand it would be to flee into madness.  _I can cope with torture,_ I told myself; I had been a prisoner of war before, and had been interrogated less than gently for information about Asgard’s battle plans.  But a dark voice whispered that I was dealing with an enemy of a different order than I had ever faced before, one who would be less interested in breaking my body, which could withstand quite a lot of pain and heal quickly, than in tearing apart my mind.

When we reached my cell, the Other shoved me inside, saying harshly, “My master will call for you again,” then slammed the door shut, leaving me alone.  I saw that food and water had been left for me.  The food turned out to be a gluey block of protein and other vital nutrients of the kind that was commonly eaten on long space flights—though space travelers usually have ways of cooking and seasoning the stuff to make it more palatable.  I almost gagged on the clay-like texture and the bland, almost bitter taste, but I was hungry enough, and knew well enough that I needed the sustenance, that I forced it down.  The cell was no longer nearly as cold as it had been before—indeed, I was almost uncomfortably warm in my Jötun form—so I shifted back into Aesir form, for my own pride if nothing else, and waited.

My sense of the passage of time during my imprisonment was hazy.  With no source of daylight and nothing to keep me occupied save the workings of my own mind, time seemed to dilate and contract fitfully.  My only landmarks were the times when the door slid open a crack and someone pushed in a bottle of water and another small cube of protein.  I estimated that this happened twice a day, morning and evening.  The protein blocks always left me feeling somewhat unsatisfied; I suspected that while they contained all the nutrients I required to stay healthy, they did not contain quite enough calories to keep up my energy.  This, at least, was familiar from my previous experience of captivity.

At irregular intervals, the cell would grow unbearably cold again, so that I would be forced to shift into Jötun form in order not to freeze, or else wait until I passed out and my body did it for me.  At first I tried to hold out as long as I could, to preserve the illusion that I was master of my own will, that I could choose my identity.  But gradually I stopped seeing the point of fighting the change.  I tried to find pride-saving justifications for allowing myself to shift.  _Why should I be ashamed of what I was born?_ I asked myself.  I could think of only too many reasons.  _I have done far more shameful things,_ I reminded myself, _and not merely to stay alive, but to advance my career._   This did not make me feel better.  Think what you will of me for it, but I felt far more instinctive disgust at wearing a Jötun’s body—my _true_ body, I thought with loathing—than at prostituting myself for information or gain.  Eventually I stopped trying to justify it to myself.  It was enough that I finally felt warm.

But the worst thing was not the hunger or cold or humiliation; it was the waiting.  The anticipation of being summoned again, without knowing when it would happen or what was in store for me when the summons finally came, was its own kind of torture.  I tried desperately not to let my imagination deepen the torment by conjuring up possible horrors, or my memory taunt me by recalling how my own pride and stupidity had brought me to this pass.  I tried to think of something, anything else.  I thought about physics, mathematics, philosophy; I tried to recollect poems I had read or been made to memorize as a child; I recited the names of Asgardian kings and heroes, and told myself their stories.  But as the days went on it became harder and harder to think of things to distract myself with, and not to give into the dark temptation to torture myself by speculating and remembering.

About a week passed in this way before the Other returned for me.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did anyone catch the quote from _The Princess Bride_ and/or the allusion to _Firefly?_


	5. Cowardice in the Face of the Enemy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thanos gets to know Loki better, in ways that Loki finds less than pleasant.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OK, now you can have a bit of whump.
> 
> Part of this chapter was inspired by [this suggestion](http://ladyofmidgard.tumblr.com/post/135799126013/oh-ive-thought-of-another-one-growing-up-loki) from [ladymacbeth99](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ladymacbeth99/pseuds/ladymacbeth99) (ladyofmidgard on Tumblr) in response to a request for sad headcanons. (Read her work, it's awesome!)
> 
>  **Warnings:** torture, both physical and psychological, including what amounts to mind rape.

“My master requires your presence again,” the Other announced.  He did not have the scepter with him, I noticed; instead, he simply grabbed me by the elbow to lead me before Thanos’s throne.  Despite the disgust that his touch provoked in me, I obediently kept pace with him up the many flights of stairs to the surface of the asteroid and on to the peak where Thanos held court.  I felt myself tiring quickly—the result of constant hunger—and when we reached the surface, I began to shiver in the bone-deep cold of space.

“I told you it would do no good to lie to me,” Thanos rebuked with false gentleness when I stood shivering before him.  Gritting my teeth, an ineffectual glare my only form of defiance, I shifted into my Jötun form.  Thanos gave me an approving smile.  “Good.  You learn quickly.”

Then he picked up the curved scepter set with the blue gem, which had been lying on the throne beside him.  _That explains why the Other didn’t have it_ was the most coherent thought that surfaced amid the wave of apprehension that overtook me.

“Now, Loki—may I call you Loki?” he asked, absurdly.

“I prefer ‘Your Highness,’” I dared to retort, made bold by my irritation at his mocking pretense of civility.

Thanos chuckled with an air of magnanimous tolerance.  “I appreciate a sense of humor in my friends.  Now, _Your Highness,_ I would like to know everything that you know about Earth.”

I opened my mouth without speaking for a moment, puzzled by the request, then said, “That would take rather a long time.”

Thanos smiled again, more predatory this time.  “Not such a quick learner after all.  It would take a long time for you to _tell_ me everything you know.  How fortunate that I have a way to speed up the process.”  He pointed the scepter at me and, without his even having to touch me with it, I could feel him searching around in my mind.  It felt like having my skull cut open and invasive fingers reaching into my brain, prying apart the folds and digging into the crevices to hunt for something.  I flinched and shuddered, but tried to keep my face blank.  I closed my eyes and thought of Midgard (in a rather different context this time), hoping that it would be over faster if I made it easier for him to find what he wanted.

Finally the phantom fingers withdrew, and I opened my eyes again, breathing a quiet sigh of relief.  “Very good,” Thanos beamed, a grotesque parody of a proud teacher.

“So, it seems your brother—I’m sorry, your _adoptive_ brother—is quite fond of this planet,” Thanos said in an exaggerated tone of friendly curiosity.

 _Fuck, fuck, he got_ that _out of my knowledge of Midgard?_ “What of it?” I said as calmly as I could.

“Do you think he’ll pose an obstacle to your invasion?”

“My invasion,” I repeated, letting my carefully neutral tone convey my resistance.

“Really, Loki—excuse me, _Your Highness—_ you aren’t still pretending you have the option of _refusing_ my errand, are you?”

I gritted my teeth, galled to hear my own jest turned around to mock me, and said nothing.

“Do you think Thor will oppose an invasion of Earth?” Thanos asked again.

“I don’t know,” I said evenly.

Thanos sighed with feigned disappointment.  “You know by now why it does no good to lie, don’t you?  If I want to know everything you know about your brother, I’ll find out.”

 _No, not Thor,_ I found myself thinking.  Where did that come from?  I had thought that the only feelings I had left for the man who had been my brother were anger and resentment; but at the thought of this madman threatening him, all of that seemed to vanish, replaced by a fierce protective loyalty.  Or perhaps, less admirably, the impulse was: _No one is allowed to hurt Thor other than me._

But then Thanos was pointing the scepter at me again.  This time, as he pulled memories out of my head, with a feeling like tearing scabs from wounds, they also ran through my consciousness, replaying my relationship with Thor—but going backwards in time, as if he was peeling off successive layers of memory, the more recent ones being closer to the surface.

_Thor groans with exertion as he struggles to hold onto the staff that holds me to the edge of the Bifröst; “Loki, no!  No!” he cries, almost a sob, as I open my hand and let myself fall away toward the abyss._

_He holds out his hand to my save my double from falling from the side of the bridge (“Brother, please,” it begs); then it vanishes at his touch and I strike at him, laughing._

_“I will not fight you, brother!”, he insists, and I snarl back, “I’m not your brother.  I never was.”_

_“Brother, whatever I have done to wrong you, whatever I have done to lead you to do this, I am truly sorry,” he says, walking out alone to face the Destroyer.  “But these people are innocent.  Taking their lives will gain you nothing.  So take mine, and end this.”  I do not blast him with the Destroyer’s fire—nothing so crude and violent; mustn’t ruin that perfect body, that perfect face—but as it turns and walks away, I let it backhand him—hard enough, perhaps, to kill his mortal form._

_I come to him on Midgard and inform him sadly that our father is dead and he can never return to Asgard.  “This is goodbye, brother.  I’m so sorry,” I lie, the picture of solemn regret.  “No, I am sorry.  Thank you for coming here.”  “Farewell.”_

_“I love Thor more dearly than any of you, but you know what he is.  He’s arrogant, he’s reckless, he’s dangerous.  You saw how he was today.  Is that what Asgard needs from its king?”_

_“Thor, stop and think.  Look around you.  We’re outnumbered.”  “Know your place, brother.”_

_“You are incapable of sincerity.”  “Am I?  I’ve looked forward to this day as long as you have.  You’re my brother and my friend.  Sometimes I’m envious, but never doubt that I love you…”_

Strangely, it was not a moment of bitterness or duplicity or grief that galvanized me to wrench away, somehow, from the grip of Thanos’s phantom fingers prying into my mind; it was that last moment of genuine affection, not entirely happy or fully honest (I was not looking forward to the start of Thor’s reign), but sincere in the basic emotion.  _No, that’s mine, you can’t have that,_ I thought—or maybe I said it out loud—and I jerked my head away so forcefully that I stumbled backwards.

“Oh, Loki, we were doing so well,” Thanos chided me.  “For a moment there, I felt I was truly getting to know you.”

“And now you’re getting to know me even better,” I shot back, made reckless by the surge of adrenaline it had taken to pull away from his mental grasp.

“There are those who would say that you don’t really know a man until you’ve pushed him to the limits of his endurance,” Thanos mused.

 _Oh, are we going to switch to physical torture now?_   I was almost relieved: at least then I would know more or less what I was dealing with; and I knew that if he still wanted me to conquer a planet for him, he couldn’t do anything that would permanently maim me.  Perhaps hoping to push him in that direction by annoying him, or simply out of perversity, I remarked impertinently, “There are also those who would say that you don’t really know a man until you’ve seen his artwork.”

Thanos chuckled.  “I do hope you’ll keep that sense of humor.”

_You hope I’ll keep it—what, after you’ve driven me mad?  I was already halfway there with no help from you, and I haven’t lost it yet._

“I’m going to ask you about your brother again, Loki, and this time I expect you to tell me everything.  Remember, there are consequences for keeping the truth from me.”

Before I had time to prepare myself, he pointed the scepter at me again, and the invisible fingers started digging deeper into my memory.  I saw, as Thanos saw, myself and Thor fighting battles together on other worlds, sparring on Asgard’s training yards, drinking together in the palace’s great feasting hall or the little pub near the soldiers’ barracks.  Thanos saw us sniping at each other, Thor ribbing me for my reclusive scholarly habits and belittling my use of magic _(“Some do battle, others just do tricks”),_ while I retaliated mostly by impugning his intelligence.  He saw how I hung back and rarely spoke (except to discourage truly stupid actions) when Thor and I spent time with his friends, Lady Sif and the Warriors Three.  He heard the envious and resentful thoughts that went through my head— _Is this really what Asgardians want in their king?  Can’t they see that it’s_ wisdom _that makes a good ruler?—_ alternating with moments of crippling self-doubt: _Maybe Thor and everyone else don’t value what I do because it isn’t valuable; maybe I really am a useless, vile, selfish coward._ He saw how pathetically I clung to any validation from my big brother—the impressed, almost surprised way he said _“Well done, Loki!”_ when I managed to disarm him while sparring; the low approving whistle he gave when he first saw me throw two knives in rapid succession, one from each hand, with deadly accuracy.  I turned and smiled slyly at him and said something dry and irreverent— _“So now you know that if you do something to anger me, running away won’t save you”—_ but internally I glowed with pride, I thought maybe I was good for something after all…

“No,” I said tensely, my voice shaking with rage and shame.  I took a step backwards and the movement broke the spell.

Thanos sighed.  “I told you not to hold anything back.  You disobeyed me.  Do you know what happens to soldiers who disobey their commanders?”

“Am I your soldier now?” I asked, my voice still low and tightly controlled.

“I want you to be my general, to lead my forces in conquest.  But how can you be a general if you are not first a soldier?  How can you hope to command if you do not first learn to obey?”

“Did you ever learn to obey?” I quietly challenged him.

“Oh, yes.  I obey the wishes of one far greater than myself, and I submit to her punishments when I fail her.  I have known pain, little prince—far more than you have, despite your long life—and it has made me strong.  As it will make you strong, a good soldier first and then a great leader.”

Thanos gave an almost imperceptible nod to the Other, who barked an order to two soldiers in an alien language (Chitauri, it turned out): “Bring it.”  The soldiers, who had been standing at attention in a shadowy corner, came forward.  One of them held a long leather whip with several tails (was it nine? I wondered vaguely), each tipped with a small piece of metal—a scourge, more properly.

I felt a surge of apprehension in my stomach, but I raised my eyebrows at Thanos as if unimpressed.  “That wouldn’t be used to punish a soldier for anything less than desertion, or cowardice in the face of the enemy.”  The metal tips could rip out chunks of flesh, which might leave an Asgardian soldier unable to perform his duties for a month, and would likely kill a Midgardian.

“How do you know that isn’t what you’re being punished for?” Thanos asked, amused.

“Are you my enemy?” I returned boldly.

Thanos’s smile broadened.  “You think I meant _me?_ Poor child.  You will see.  Cowardice in the face of the enemy… and disobedience to a commanding officer.  What do you think?  Twenty lashes?”

I snorted; of course he wasn’t actually looking for an answer.  The Other jerked his head to the two Chitauri soldiers, who approached me from either side, grabbed my elbows, and reached for the collar of my coat to tear it off; I thought I heard one of them unsheathe a knife.

“Wait,” I said, pulling my arms away roughly enough to slow them down, though not to shake them off.

“It’s a bit late for repentance,” Thanos remarked.

“That’s not it,” I snapped.  “I don’t want them to damage my clothes.”

Thanos raised his eyebrows, his eyes gleaming with astonished mirth.  “Oh?”

“Let me take them off myself.”  I stared up at him unwaveringly.

Thanos looked mildly impressed, but still mostly amused.  He waved his hand lazily at the Other, who, looking shocked and doubtful, unhooked the chain that connected my wrist cuffs to each other—though he left the cuffs themselves on, presumably to repress my magic.  At a natural, steady pace—neither deliberately slow nor hurried, careful not to appear to be either stalling or intimidated—I removed my vambraces, my overcoat, my leather tunic, the lightweight green shirt I wore underneath.  Folding them over and laying them on the ground with some care, I remarked with affected lightness, “I don’t really see the point of all this.”

“Don’t you?”

“I’m sure you have cleaner and more efficient methods of torture.  Don’t you think this is a bit… crude?  Outdated?”

He laughed; I was disturbed by how not sinister it sounded.  “Of course.  But we all enjoy some old-fashioned pleasures now and again, don’t we?”

“I do sometimes prefer to read books whose illustrations don’t move around,” I agreed, deadpan.

The soldier holding the scourge handed it to the Other, and then the two soldiers seized my arms to hold me still.

“Is it a good idea for your soldiers to witness their future commander being disciplined in this way?” I asked.  It was only half a delaying tactic.

“Oh, these ones won’t be in the invading force; they’re just part of my household guard.”

The first blow struck before I was quite prepared for it, and I staggered forward, pulling against the firm grip that held my arms.  Searing pain tore across my back.  I didn’t make a sound, though; I only breathed more deeply to coax myself through the pain.  _Battle wounds,_ I told myself.  _This is nothing worse than I’ve handled a hundred times before._

“And you needn’t worry about them telling their comrades,” Thanos continued as if nothing had happened.  “None of my guards have tongues to tell anything with.”

Grotesque, but hardly surprising.  I allowed my disgust and contempt to show plainly on my face as the next blow fell; better to show that than pain.  _I would fall into the clutches of this cliché of a sadistic cosmic tyrant,_ I thought resignedly.  If I believed that the Norns had any powers other than the ability to rapidly analyze extremely complex patterns of thought and action, I might have said that they were punishing me for my own overweening ambition.

It became gradually more difficult to remain silent, and upright, as the blows kept falling.  When I bit down on my lip to keep from crying out, the cut I had bitten into it not long before reopened quickly.  Again I tried silently reciting the names of Asgardian kings to distract myself, but it was difficult to keep track when every other name was accompanied by the feeling of my skin being slashed open in nine places, the metal barbs sometimes catching in the cuts and tearing wider, deeper wounds on their way out.  Perhaps halfway through I stopped being able to think about much of anything.  Several times I started to sag to my knees, but the Chitauri soldiers hauled me to my feet again.  To my credit, I don’t think I ever screamed, exactly.  At first I would only let my stubborn silence be broken by grunts and hisses, but by the end I was whimpering.

When it was finally over, my arms were released and I fell heavily to my knees.  I could feel the blood running down my back not in rivulets, but almost in sheets.  My breaths came in painful gasps, and I could hear little over the roaring and pounding in my ears.  I think Thanos said something, but I could not make sense of the words.  The two soldiers pulled me to my feet again and began to shove me toward the door, but I pulled back with what little strength I had left and nodded unsteadily toward the bundle of clothing that lay half-folded on the floor.  It may seem strange that I remembered it through my haze of pain, but to my clouded mind it felt like my pride was lying there at my feet, folded into that leather coat I had found on my first day in the strange world I had fallen into.  The Other picked up the bundle of clothing and shoved it into my arms, then the two soldiers half-dragged, half-carried me back to my cell.  Unexpectedly, one of them unlocked and removed the cuffs on my wrists before they dropped me on my knees and slid the door shut behind me.

I found myself grateful for the warmth my Jötun form provided, because I knew I wouldn’t be able to put my shirt back on without terrible pain for some time.  I lay down as carefully as I could, half on my front and half on my side, curled loosely to avoid stretching the tattered skin on my back.  I stared at my unshackled wrists, my thoughts coming only sluggishly through the fog of pain.  I could use seiðr again—but I wouldn’t be able to do much, because, as I could feel already, my body would automatically direct most of it toward healing.  That was why Thanos had resorted to the strangely archaic method of torture, I realized; he wasn’t just indulging his old-fashioned tastes in sadism.  He wanted to be able to give me access to my magic, but weakened, so that he could better control how I used it; and the best way to do that was to weaken my body, both so that much of my power would be diverted into repairing it, and so that I would have less mental and physical strength to wield what was left.  _Couldn’t he have just taken off only one of the cuffs?_ I thought resentfully.  Maybe they didn’t work that way—I had no idea how they worked.  My last dim thought before I let myself slide into merciful darkness was that old-fashioned sadism probably had _something_ to do with it.

I woke a few hours later, when food and water were slid through the door.  Though I was far from hungry, I thought I should try to eat to keep my strength up so that I could heal faster.  I crawled gingerly toward where the rations had been set down, gritting my teeth as pain radiated from my back with every slight movement.  But as soon the clay-like stuff touched my tongue, a wave of nausea crashed over me, and I retched a thin bile onto the floor, the convulsions sending fresh pain shooting through my whole body.  I wet my cracked, bloody lips and dry, heavy tongue with the water, but felt I would retch again if I tried to swallow it, so I spat it out, then curled forward on my side again and returned to the shelter of unconsciousness.

When I woke again I was shivering, though I was still in my Jötun form.  I had a fever, I realized.  Someone else must have noticed (I had no doubt that there were cameras in the ceiling), because the door opened again and the Other walked in, holding something small in one hand.  He didn’t even bother to close the door behind him, I noticed, feeling disgusted with my own weakness.  He stooped to place the thing he was holding on the floor in front of my face: an elongated blue capsule.  “Antibiotics,” he said.  For a few moments, I didn’t move, and neither did he.  Was he going to stand there until I took it, I wondered?  I pushed myself up painfully to a sitting position and looked up at him, a half-formed question on my lips.  “Yes, it works on Asgardians, and Frost Giants,” he said impatiently.  I put the capsule in my mouth, reached for the water, took a sip, and tried to swallow—but I could feel myself about to gag again, and I spat the pill back out into my hand.

“I can’t,” I said, my voice sounding thick.  I felt almost as sick with shame as with pain.

“Very well,” he said, then walked out (this time he shut the door behind him).  I wondered if he was going to let the infection run its course, even if that meant running the small but not negligible risk that I might die.  _It appears that I wasn’t that important after all,_ I mused.  But then the Other came back after a few minutes, followed by one of Thanos’s silent Chitauri guards, who was holding a syringe full of a clear liquid.  Neither of us said anything as the guard approached me, stuck the needle in my arm, injected the fluid, pulled the syringe away, and then left.  The Other stared down at me appraisingly for a few silent moments, while I met his gaze, unflinching.  _So you do need me,_ I thought triumphantly at him, as if he could hear me.  Then he, too, turned and left.

My dreams when I slept (as opposed to simply passing out) were vivid, fragmented, and strange.  I don’t remember much, except that Thanos’s face kept blurring together with Laufey’s and Odin’s.  I would think I was speaking to one of them, and suddenly find that it was another I was facing.  “You are my son,” said Laufey as snow flurried through the weapons vault in Asgard.  “So you’re the one who showed us the way into Asgard,” said Thanos, as the throne of Jötunheim turned into the great throne floating above Sanctuary.  “Madness is strength.  It is your safety.  It is your _only_ safety,” said Odin, looking down at me with crushing disappointment.  So I let go.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yay, more allusions to _Firefly,_ plus a Proust joke, a bit of mild badassery partly inspired by Patrick Rothfuss's book _The Name of the Wind,_ and a nod to the British naval "cat o' nine tails" (more Gilbert  & Sullivan jokes, anyone? "The merry cat o' nine tails, the merry cat o' nine tails, the merry cat o' nine tails and the tar!").


	6. The Abyss Gazes Also

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thanos introduces a more efficient method of interrogation and instruction; Loki takes advantage of his restored access to magic and stumbles across an old favorite book.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warnings:** torture continues, mostly psychological; more mind rape; suicidal thoughts, past and present.

After spending about a day hovering between painful waking and restless sleep, I woke drenched in sweat but no longer shivering, and feeling somewhat less terrible than I had before.  My fever had broken, which meant the infection must be subsiding.  “Oh true apothecary, thy drugs are quick,” I found myself muttering, though I couldn’t tell you why that phrase entered my mind.

Although the wounds on my back still burned and ached, I could feel that I now had enough strength to be able to use my seiðr to do more than just knit my flesh back together.  The first thing I did to flex what power had been restored to me was to clean myself off, removing the blood and sweat from my skin, the sweat and grease from my lank hair.  Then, while I was at it, I cleaned my blood and vomit off the floor of my cell.

I had not been extensively trained in healing magic, unfortunately, so I could do little to accelerate my healing that my body and my latent seiðr had not been doing without my conscious assistance already.  What I could do, however, was use a spell to dull the pain somewhat.

Food and water had been left for me while I slept, and I finally felt somewhat hungry—or at least, I did not feel that I would vomit if I attempted to swallow anything.  I took three bites of the protein block before I began to feel nauseous.  _Better than nothing,_ I told myself.  The next day, I was able to take five bites of the morning’s ration, and eat half of the evening’s.  I maintained the pain-dulling spell but otherwise allowed most of my magic to continue being directed toward healing.

By the following day, my wounds had closed up thoroughly enough that I could put on a shirt without worrying that they would reopen and start bleeding again, which would mean that I could shift back to my Aesir form.  Even sunk to these depths, my vanity had not left me.  The fabric of the shirt, light and soft though it was, scraped painfully over my still-healing cuts; but I simply strengthened the numbing spell as much as I could and endured the rest.  I shifted my form with a pathetic sigh of relief and channeled what little magical strength I had left into warming myself.

The day after that—five days after my last audience with Thanos and my chastisement at the hands of his servants—the Other came for me again.  “My master requires your presence,” he said as before.

“One moment,” I said.  The Other hissed in irritation as I unfolded my tunic and coat and put them on over my shirt as carefully as I could, wincing when the stiff leather pushed against my incompletely healed wounds.  I put a little more energy into the pain-dulling spell, but made sure I still had some reserves of usable seiðr, just in case.

“Lead on,” I said obediently when I had finished buckling my vambraces on over my sleeves.  The Other gripped me by the elbow again to lead me to Thanos’s throne.  No scepter and no handcuffs, I noticed.  They were quite confident in the extent to which I had been cowed into submission.

When we reached the great throne, I saw, as I had both feared and expected, that Thanos was holding the scepter again.  He smiled a sickening welcome as I approached.  “I trust you have recovered from our last interview?”  His expression of concern held a taunting edge.

“Well enough,” I said curtly.  The throbbing in my back gave the lie to my statement even as I uttered it.

“Good!  Then we can continue the conversation we were having before you interrupted it—quite rudely, I must add.”

“My deepest apologies,” I drawled.

Thanos ignored my impertinence.  “Today we’re going to try something new,” he announced cheerfully, “something that I think will allow us to get to know each other better than ever.”

To my great surprise and mounting dread, Thanos rose and stepped down from his great throne, still holding the scepter.  I took an apprehensive step back, and the Other seized my elbow again and held me in place with a vise-like grip.  I could feel myself trembling, but I forced myself to look boldly into Thanos’s eyes as he approached me.  When he touched the scepter to my chest, I expected my mind to go blank as it had when the Other had used it.  But instead I felt a link establish itself between my mind and Thanos’s, as if a wire stretched from my brain into his.

“I’ve created a two-way channel,” Thanos explained as he turned to reascend his throne.  I felt the slightest tug at the invisible wire as he moved away.  “So I can now send information into as well as draw it out of your mind.  And if you try to cut off the flow of information again, I can send instant… discouragement.”

I definitely did not like the sound of that.

“Let’s test this out,” Thanos said.  I was fairly certain he knew exactly how it worked.  “I want to know everything you know about Asgard.”

 _Shit,_ I barely had time to think, and then images started playing before my eyes before being pulled along the invisible wire connecting me with Thanos.  I saw the great city as it looks to a rider coming down the Rainbow Bridge from the Observatory, the golden spires of the palace rising from the water’s edge to tower over the landscape.  Because I had recently been reciting the names of Asgardian kings and heroes to distract myself, the list played through my head again.  _Quite the history scholar,_ said an amused voice in my head that was not mine.

I shuddered briefly, then my memory took us into the training yards in the palace where I had spent much of my youth learning to become a warrior.  From there my mind wandered to the pub between the yards and the barracks where I had gotten drinks with Thor and his friends so many evenings after training.  Those memories led me out into the city, to the markets we browsed on our free days, then to the hills outside the city and the mountains beyond, where the six of us used to ride or hunt, and the little bays and inlets where we swam or fished or sailed.  I could not suppress the worry that Thanos might use the information I was giving him to plan an invasion of Asgard, and I felt his chuckle in response to that thought.  _I’m not showing him any more than a good map of Asgard would,_ I reassured myself; to which he replied, _A very detailed map indeed._

When my memories turned back to the palace, the first place they went was the library; they even led us into my favorite corner, where I had left a pile of books that I meant to read but that the librarian wouldn’t let me take out (even the princes quailed before the wrath of the royal librarian).  I wondered idly if my pile of books was still there, or if someone had put the books away after I died.  Thanos laughed silently in my head again.  From the library my memory drifted to my own chambers.  I could feel myself cringing as I involuntarily showed Thanos the contents of my bedroom and the attached study, the papers and open books strewn across my desk, the little souvenirs from my journeys to other realms (diplomatic and recreational as well as military) decorating my bookshelves and end tables.  The next place my mind went was, of course, Thor’s chambers, just adjacent to mine, and connected by a shared balcony overlooking the water, where we had spent many a lazy evening drinking mead or wine filched from the kitchen cellar and chatting about nothing.  It nauseated me even more to show Thanos the inside of Thor’s rooms than my own, but I did not wish to find out what would happen if I tried to pull my mind away—at least not yet.

My mind wandered into the kitchens next, then the great feasting hall, and from there into the throne room, where I replayed the painful memory of Thor’s almost-coronation, the cheers and adulation he received from the throng of soldiers and nobles and citizens— _They will never cheer that way for me,_ I thought as I had thought then, then grimaced with the humiliation of Thanos hearing it.  Then I knew with a sinking dread where my memories would take us next, and of course as soon as I thought it the images turned there: the weapons vault, where Odin and Thor and I had gone to view the damage after the Jötun infiltration that I had orchestrated.  _“So you’re the one who showed us the way into Asgard,”_ said Thanos’s voice from my fever dream— _No, no, he can’t see that,_ I thought, wrenching my mind away before Thanos could see more than the staircase and the entryway, the pedestal where the Casket rested, the gate that sealed in the Destroyer…

The “discouragement” that Thanos had warned me of was, indeed, instantaneous.  As soon as I had cut off the stream of memories that Thanos was drawing out of me, I was struck by an onslaught of sudden, vicious, crippling pain.  It was centered mostly in my head—a feeling like knives stabbing into my temples, an immense pressure building inside my skull until I thought it might shatter—but I also felt a flush of searing heat and stinging pain over all my limbs, as if my skin had burned away to expose the raw flesh beneath, and a wrenching in my gut, as if a hand were reaching in to twist my insides.  This time I screamed: I couldn’t help it.

The pain withdrew as suddenly as it had started, and I fell to my hands and knees, retching up what little I had managed to eat that day.  I squeezed my eyes shut to try to stem the flow of tears and breathed deeply to quell my shaking.  “Much cleaner, don’t you think?” said Thanos’s amused voice from above me.  “Well, except for that last part.”  Glaring up at him, I used my seiðr to clean my own vomit off the floor, again.  “I knew there was a reason I let you have your magic back,” he said.  I bared my teeth in something between a sneer and a snarl.

“Anyway, it certainly is more efficient,” Thanos continued.  “This”—he hefted the scepter—“allows me to access the pain receptors in your sensory cortex directly, so that you feel pain without my actually having to damage your body any further.  Which would be troublesome and ultimately counterproductive.”

I stood shakily.  The memory of the horrific pain was still vivid, but the pain itself was only a faint echo; the only thing that still hurt much was my back, which had been jarred by my abrupt collapse.  I felt a trickle of blood from below my right shoulder blade—a cut had reopened, so I directed a small surge of magic to close it up and clean the blood off my shirt.

“So much for the proof of principle,” Thanos said, businesslike.  “The beauty of this system is that you don’t need to be in front of me for me to be able to access your thoughts.  I can simply reach out with my mind and ask you a question at any time—or share my knowledge with you.”

“Then am I free to go?” I asked coldly, pushing my sickening horror to the back of my mind.

Thanos narrowed his eyes.  He was displeased, I think, that I had dared to dismiss myself, but curious about my capacity for resistance, so he let it pass.  “Yes, I have no further need of you.”

The Other took my elbow and steered me down the stairs.  As we walked through the doorway to the underground complex that housed my cell, we encountered a strange young woman with green skin and dark hair, who was on her way out to the pavilion where Thanos held court.  As I walked past, she turned briefly and regarded me with something that resembled pity, which made me wonder just how dreadful I looked.

Alone in my cell again, I tried to calm my racing mind so that I could think through my situation rationally.  I was not sure why I had been so horrified at the thought of unwittingly aiding an assault on Asgard; there had been low days during my exile when I had thought I would gladly see it burn to the ground.  I wondered if it was not much the same reason I had felt so protective of Thor when Thanos searched through my memories of him.  I made a vow to myself then that if anyone ever tore Asgard down, it would be me, and no one would be pulling my strings—though I might well let someone else do my dirty work.  (Oh, don’t look so worried.  I’m not going to be bringing the kingdom down from in here.)

I tried to think of a way to protect certain thoughts and memories from Thanos, since I wasn’t sure how many times I could stand to endure the pain that punished me for pulling away from the mental connection.  I knew how to hide myself from Heimdall’s gaze, but this was different: Thanos was not only listening to my words and watching my actions, but prying into my mind and tearing out my thoughts.

The first desperate idea that occurred to me was to try to access the pocket dimension where I kept my knives.  Of course I had no illusions about my ability to fight my way out; but if I killed myself, then Thanos could not get any information about Asgard’s weaknesses from me, or use me as a pawn in whatever game he was planning.  _Let someone else lead his invasion of Earth._   I didn’t really think it would work, of course; the cells in Asgard’s dungeons are enchanted to block access to other dimensions.  Surprisingly, though, when I reached mentally for my storage dimension, I found it open to me.

But before I could close my hand around one of the knives, I felt a surge of the same stabbing pain in my head, the burning in my limbs, the twisting in my gut that I had when I pulled away from Thanos’s grasp, though less powerful than before.  I sank to my knees again, clenching my teeth, and heard Thanos’s voice in my head again: _None of that,_ he said.

How did he know?  He must have set up some kind of trigger in the connection between our minds so that he was alerted whenever I used my magic, and could peer in on what I was trying to do with it.  Which meant, I realized despairingly, that even if I figured out a way to shield certain thoughts and memories from him the way I could shield actions from Heimdall, he would see what I was doing before I could put the shield in place.  Could I fight through the pain long enough either to set up the shield, or to grab a knife from the pocket dimension and kill myself?  I wasn’t sure; I suspected that he could intensify it until I could no longer think, let alone act with precision.  And if he knew that I had hidden something from him—or if I wasn’t able to die fast enough—he could make my punishment slow and unutterably agonizing.

I sat down on the floor and put my head in my hands, for once completely at a loss.  I had always been able to think and talk my way out of difficult situations, but this was like nothing I had faced, either as a warrior-prince of Asgard or as an elite criminal of the Andromeda Galaxy.  I was well and truly fucked.

Since I knew I could access pocket dimensions, I reached for another one—one where I kept books that I was in the middle of reading, or meant to read, or that I had read many times and found comfort in.  (This was an extremely useful thing to have access to during especially long and boring meetings of Asgard’s High Council.)  Surely Thanos would not stop me from retrieving those.  I grabbed the book that was nearest to hand (“on the top of the stack” doesn’t quite capture the configuration) and pulled it into my cell; I felt a tug at the invisible wire to my mind as Thanos looked in on what I was doing, but he didn’t stop me.

I looked at the cover of the book I was holding: _Beyond Good and Evil,_ written by a Midgardian philosopher from the late nineteenth century, Friedrich Nietzsche.  This was one of my comforting books; I had discovered Nietzsche’s works in the early twentieth century and found the prose rich and intoxicating, the ideas novel and strange but somehow familiar, somehow right.  I had tried to talk about them with Thor once or twice, however, and had been met only with either blank or scandalized stares.

I flipped through the pages, skimming over the words, and stopped when I reached the beginning of the fourth part, titled “Epigrams and Interludes.”  These brief little aphorisms were the part of the book I had always found most cryptic and puzzling, but my mind did not feel capable of following the allusive, elliptical arguments of the longer sections, so I read through the epigrams instead, taking note of certain ones that seemed especially to speak to me now.

_“68. ‘I have done that,’ says my memory.  ‘I cannot have done that,’ says my pride, and remains inexorable.  Eventually—memory yields.”_

_“78. Whoever despises himself still respects himself as one who despises.”_

_“89. Terrible experiences pose the riddle whether the person who has them is not terrible.”_

_“116. The great epochs of our life come when we gain the courage to rechristen our evil as what is best in us.”_

_“146. Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.  And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”_

I paused for a long time over this last passage, reading it to myself again and again.  _“There are those who would say that you don’t really know a man until you’ve pushed him to the limits of his endurance,”_ Thanos had said.  I had thought he was talking about physical pain, but now I was less sure.  I found myself in an impossible situation, with no choice but to betray the world I had called home, my will—my very thoughts—no longer my own.  I was staring into an abyss indeed, no less dark than the one that had yawned below the shattered bridge, and it was gazing searchingly back at me, asking: who are you really?  I was fighting a monster, truly, and it was a losing battle.  My only choice, it seemed, was to stop fighting against him and fight for him—to become a monster myself.  Or was it only revealing myself to be the monster I already was?  _“Because I am the monster parents tell their children about at night?”_

Not for the first or the last time, I wished fervently that my fall from the Bifröst had killed me, as I had intended.  I turned the page of the book to an aphorism I knew would be there, one that had struck me when I first read it a century ago, that I had written down for myself to remember and thought of on many occasions during the hundred years since: _“157. The thought of suicide is a powerful comfort: it helps one through many a dreadful night.”_ But even that door, by which I could always escape from sorrows that seemed unbearable, was no longer open.

Feeling too hollow and defeated even to weep, I curled up to sleep instead.  Prosaically, I wished (though it was not half as fervent as the other wish) that I had thought to put a pillow and a bedroll in interdimensional storage on a permanent basis, rather than just for specific camping trips.  Lacking any other comforts, I hugged my book to my chest like the favorite toy horse I had had as a child.  A book may not seem like an especially comforting object (this particular book even less so), but it was my only link to my old life, before Thanos, before my fall, before I found out that my whole world was built on a lie.  It was a piece not of Asgard, which I still resented, but of Midgard, where I had once been feared and worshiped as a god; that paradoxical realm whose reigning night of barbarous ignorance was occasionally shattered by luminous flashes of creativity and insight.  Maybe I could rule Midgard, I thought, trying to make the best of the situation.  Maybe I could try to suppress its worst impulses and nourish its best.  I hugged the book tighter and fell into a weary, dreamless sleep.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An unusually short chapter this time -- sorry about that -- but at least I finally explain what the title was about, so I guess that's something? It looks like I have a habit of giving stories titles that don't make any sense until several chapters in. (It was Chapter 4 in [Silver and Gold](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5047336/chapters/11606062)).
> 
> Nietzsche's philosophy, as expressed in _Beyond Good and Evil_ in particular, will continue to be important -- I'm going to use it to explain some of the weird shit Loki says about freedom in _The Avengers._ So it's not just a dorky throwaway or an excuse for the fic title...
> 
> I've illustrated a couple of the aphorisms from _Beyond Good and Evil_ quoted in this chapter ([78](http://philosopherking1887.tumblr.com/post/135767115185/philosopherking1887-whoever-despises-himself) and [116](http://philosopherking1887.tumblr.com/post/135899012900/philosopherking1887-the-great-epochs-of-our)), as well as some other Nietzsche quotes, with appropriate Loki photosets on [my Tumblr blog](http://philosopherking1887.tumblr.com/), in case that kind of thing sounds amusing to you.


	7. Lessons

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thanos shares some information with Loki as well as extracting it, not all of it intentionally; Gamora is sent to help Loki get back in fighting shape.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, some of what's in this chapter was inspired by [this suggestion](http://ladyofmidgard.tumblr.com/post/135799126013/oh-ive-thought-of-another-one-growing-up-loki) from [ladymacbeth99](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ladymacbeth99/pseuds/ladymacbeth99) (@ladyofmidgard on Tumblr), following up some of what was in Chapter 5.
> 
>  **Warnings:** Psychological torture/mind rape continues; more references to suicidal thoughts.

As promised, Thanos began to peer into my mind at random intervals without bothering to summon me into his presence.  It seemed to make no difference to him whether I was awake or asleep at the time; or perhaps he intruded on my sleep deliberately, to drive me into deeper and deeper exhaustion, to make sure there was never a moment when I felt safe.

Sometimes it was clear why he wanted the information.  He wanted to know about my fighting skills—the military training I had received in my youth, my experience of combat—in order to assess my competence to lead an invading force, and to determine how best to use me to prepare the invasion.  Presumably he wanted to know everything I knew about Frost Giants because I am one (there, I said it), and he needed to know about any hidden vulnerabilities I might have as a result, or any unexpected strengths.  But I suspect he also wanted to watch me drowning in disgust and self-loathing, to parade before my mind all the prejudices I had grown up with and now turned on myself.  _Brutish, uncivilized, untrustworthy, cowardly, vicious, cruel…_

He searched for any knowledge I had of Jötnar who, like myself, were born small and never grew to a giant’s height.  They were generally sickly in childhood, I had read.  _“How are you sick_ again?” _Thor asked impatiently, kneeling on my bed and bouncing a little with his unspent energy.  He wanted to go exploring, but I was cooped up inside with a fever and a wheezing cough.  “I don’t know, I’m not having any fun either,” I replied irritably, before Eir shooed Thor out of my room so I could rest—as if I needed more rest._ Runts like me often died young, if they were allowed to live past infancy at all.  The ones born small, boys especially, were traditionally left to die of exposure—but on consecrated ground, masking the callousness of the custom as piety, as an offering to their cruel gods.

Some of the information Thanos extracted was sought for more obscure reasons.  Perhaps he wanted to know certain things about me so that he could better manipulate and control me; perhaps he simply wanted to torture me, to break my will to him, by forcing me to rehearse painful and humiliating thoughts and memories.

My whole life was laid bare to him.  He saw everything I had done and gone through since I fell into the Void, the ways I had endangered and debased myself (but also distinguished myself, let us not forget!) to “claw my way up,” as he had put it, through the new world I had entered.  He felt the knife wounds to my back, my side, my gut, hastily healed with a burst of raw seiðr, so that they left puckered scars I would never lose.  He watched the nights I spent retching over the sink because someone had slipped me not quite enough poison to kill an Asgardian or a Frost Giant, but enough to make one very sick.  He saw the first time I stabbed someone at close range with one of my throwing knives, not in the heat of battle but alone in a darkened street, felt how the blood poured out over the knife to soak my hand and the body fell toward me as if attacking again, trapping my hand in the gush of blood; I spent that night, too, leaning over a sink, alternating between vomiting and scrubbing my hands raw, ready to tear my fingernails off to get the blood out from under them.  He saw the lying kisses, the passionless embraces, the invasive touches with which I bought a few words, a name, a few minutes unwatched in a certain room; he felt the loathing and disgust that made my skin crawl.  _Close your eyes and think of power._

Thanos watched all the events that led to my fall, dwelling with sadistic fascination on the most wrenching.  He saw through my eyes the terrifying, bewildering moment when a Jötun grabbed my wrist and my armor froze off but my hand and arm, unhurt, turned blue.  He saw my confrontation with Odin in Asgard’s weapons vault (fortunately, my memory was so intensely focused on the Casket and on Odin’s words that it did not show Thanos any of the other treasures in the vault); felt the waves of disbelief, horror, confusion, and anger that crashed over me by turns, threatening to drown me; heard the words that smashed the foundations of my self-understanding in two great hammer-blows: _“In the aftermath of the battle, I went into the temple and I found a baby—small for a giant’s offspring, abandoned, suffering, left to die—Laufey’s son”; “I thought we might unite our kingdoms one day—bring about an alliance, bring about a permanent peace—through you.”_

Thanos felt along with me how confusion and fear gave way to the intoxicating thrill of rewarded ambition when the doors to Odin’s bedchamber swung open, a line of Einherjar saluted me, the first minister of Asgard knelt before me, offering Gungnir to me in his outstretched hands, and Frigga said with calm confidence and pride, _“Until Odin awakens, Asgard is yours.  Make your father proud, my king.”_   He felt the surprising sting of betrayal when Thor’s friends disobeyed me by going to Midgard to retrieve him, and Heimdall disobeyed me by letting them—surprising not because of the treason itself, which I fully expected, but because their distrust and betrayal still _hurt._

He watched me murder my father by blood even as I denied him, for the sake of a father who raised me on nothing but lies— _“And your death came by the son of Odin”—_ and then be denied by that same false father, not an hour later.  He watched as I tried to destroy my own kind, mad with shame and hatred and denial and wild hope, desperate to wipe away any evidence of the monster I feared I might be, and secretly knew I was.  Another, much more recent memory twined itself with this one, the words echoing as the scenes replayed in my mind: _“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.  And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”_ And sometimes the abyss gazes down at you with disappointment and says _“No, Loki,”_ and you let yourself fall.

I knew that it did no good to pull away from Thanos’s searching gaze: he would only hit me with that horrific pain, splintering my skull and searing through my whole body; I would crumple, gasping and shaking; and then he would be in my mind again, relentlessly ripping out whatever he wanted, and I would be too weak and sick and dispirited to fight.  A few times, though, early on, I tore away from his grasp almost involuntarily because he was uncovering memories that I had long ago tried to bury, that I was accustomed to turning my mind from whenever they threatened to resurface, and _I_ didn’t want to relive them, never mind what Thanos might have thought.

What, you want me to tell _you_ what they are?  There’s another tale that I would require a certain amount of wine to relate; and I warn you, it may become maudlin.  For now I will simply say this: Thanos went digging into my youth and childhood to explore my relationship with my family—no doubt looking for ways to further… _encourage_ me (shall we say) to turn against them, as well as simply relishing my distress.  He found especially fertile ground for both projects in my memories of Thor and Odin.  Although I was usually able to talk my way out of punishment for the pranks I played on Thor and his friends, or for the messes and scrapes that Thor and I got into, there were a few times when Odin’s wrath fell heavy on my head.  I had mostly suppressed the memories of two occasions in my youth when I felt the full weight of Odin’s anger and disappointment, but Thanos was determined to peel the scabs off them and let them bleed.

The first time this happened went much as it had when I was in Thanos’s presence: I pulled away, the awful pain hit me and I collapsed (though I had recovered enough of my strength that I managed not to throw up this time), and Thanos took advantage of my weakened, demoralized state to push back into my mind and seize the memory I had tried to keep from him.

The second time was far more interesting, however.  Somehow, when I pulled away from Thanos’s grasp, I pulled something of him with me—or I pushed him out of my mind hard enough that I somehow pushed into his; since it’s all metaphorical, it’s hard to say which.  Either way: we had watched Odin chastising me for just a moment, and I resisted seeing any more; and then suddenly I was seeing Thanos, through his eyes, being chastised by his own father—a tall, slender, handsome man, nothing like his hulking malformed son.  His voice was not raised, but I could hear the fury and sorrow in his low, tight, measured voice.  I could scarcely make out the words he spoke—it seemed Thanos did not remember them, or had not really heard them at the time—and the image was soon replaced with something else.  It did not feel like a memory; it was a remembered fantasy.  Thanos imagined peeling the fair skin off his father’s face, revealing the muscle beneath—red-purple and striated like Thanos’s own face.

As abruptly as I had pushed us out of my mind and into Thanos’s, he pushed me back out and hit me with the familiar pain, but twice as powerful as I had ever felt it.  I thought it was a wonder that my skull didn’t break apart, that my flesh didn’t melt from my bones as if consumed by acid, that I didn’t vomit up everything that was inside me until only a hollow skeleton remained.

 _I did not give you permission to see that,_ Thanos’s voice said in my head.  It was uncharacteristically expressionless, with none of his usual irony or cruel amusement.  An inarticulate thought, something like _I didn’t mean to_ or _I don’t know what happened,_ ran through my head as I crouched on my hands and knees in my cell, hunched over, sobbing and retching.  Then he was gone: he did not attempt again to take the memory I had refused to show him.  He did not return for another two days.  I was terrified of the tortures he might inflict on me as punishment for what I had seen, and terrified most of all that he would not let them end in my death.

But when he did return, it was not to take more thoughts from me—at least not at first.  Instead (as he had indicated he could with the “two-way channel” he had established), he poured information into my mind: information about the Chitauri, their weapons, their fighting capabilities, their standard battle tactics.  It felt almost as invasive as when he had extracted information from me; the thoughts felt like alien intruders until I had had time to compare them with other knowledge I already possessed and incorporate them into the system of my beliefs.  I learned that the Chitauri were devoted to war above all; that they were unfailingly obedient as soldiers, ever ready to die at their commander’s orders; that they had little sense of the worth or individuality of their lives—in fact, they barely had individual minds at all, the thoughts and actions of each individual soldier being controlled at a distance, insect-like, by a central “hive mind.”  They made an efficient army, easy for a relatively inexperienced general like myself to command.

Although Thanos had begun granting me some of his knowledge, however, he was not finished taking what he wanted from my mind.  As he forced me to relive the painful moments of my life—some of them again and again, for no reason I could discern at the time, beyond mere cruelty—he subtly twisted some of them; or perhaps it was the darkness in my own mind, my misery, weariness, and wounded pride, that spread their shadow over even my brightest memories.  It was my memories of Thor, especially, that became distorted under Thanos’s touch—which makes perfect sense from a strategic standpoint: Thanos expected, quite correctly, that Thor would be the one who came to defend Midgard against my invasion, Thor whom I would have to confront and defeat.

So he pulled out my memories of Thor time and again, as he had that first day when he intruded into my mind, when I was whipped for “cowardice in the face of the enemy.”  In time I began to hear nothing but mockery in everything Thor said to me; every compliment, every word of praise or affection, was pitying, condescending, table scraps thrown to the dog who shadowed his heels.

Eventually I realized the enemy Thanos had meant, the one before whom I had shown cowardice.  _“Are you my enemy?”_ I had asked him, and he had replied, _“You think I meant_ me? _Poor child.  You will see.”_ No, Thanos was not my enemy; it was my own sentimentality, my childish affection for the brother I never had, my naïve belief that he could ever really love me—the dog at his heels, the monster under the bed—or that a monster like me could ever really love.  And I had been too blind, too cowardly, to face the truth: that all the fond words that had passed between us, all the comfortable silences and brotherly embraces, meant less than nothing; all the love, spoken and unspoken, was a lie, resting on nothing but lies.

And when Thanos replayed my memories of the wrongs I had done to Thor, he, or I, or some indistinguishable combination of us both, began throwing up defenses and justifications.  _I had to lie to him so that he would not try to return to Asgard and sabotage my plans to end the war with Jötunheim before it started.  I had no idea that the Destroyer’s blow might kill him; I did not know that his body had been made mortal, only that he was no longer worthy to lift Mjölnir.  I was well within my rights to fight him when he returned, even to the death: his banishment had not officially been lifted, hammer be damned, and he was challenging my authority as the legitimate king._ Even my very last memory of him, my last memory of Asgard, was twisted as Thanos forced me to relive it over and over.  I had not chosen the abyss, my mind decided, and Thor had not tried to save me from it—quite the contrary.  When Odin pronounced his rejection, Thor enacted it by wrenching Gungnir from my hands, leaving me to fall to my death, or worse.  His last cry took on a new meaning: it was the mirror image of Odin’s.  “No, Loki.”  “Loki, no.”

_“68. ‘I have done that,’ says my memory.  ‘I cannot have done that,’ says my pride, and remains inexorable.  Eventually—memory yields.”_

 

* * *

 

About a month after I was brought to Sanctuary, the door to my cell opened, and it was not the Other who stood there, but the strange green-skinned young woman I had seen while returning from my last interview with Thanos.  “I’ve been sent to help train you,” she said brusquely, without further explanation.

I had been sitting cross-legged on the floor, reading another one of the books I had taken from interdimensional storage (a rather frivolous Asgardian novel: starved as I was of energy and sleep, I lacked the mental stamina, and the uninterrupted time, for anything more serious; and besides, it made me feel better).  I looked up at the woman without bothering to stand.  “Train me to do what?”

“To fight,” she replied tersely.  “I understand you’re somewhat out of practice.”

I scoffed.  _“‘Out of practice’?_ How could that _possibly_ have happened when I’ve been confined to a tiny cell for weeks on end?”

The woman ignored my sarcasm.  “You’re to come with me.  Now.”

After taking the time to stow my book back in its pocket dimension, while the woman cocked her head to one side and glared at me impatiently, I stood up stiffly and followed her.  She led me through hallways lined with doors like the one into my cell, until eventually we came to a large room whose door was an open archway.  She led me into the room, then briefly disappeared into an adjoining side room.  She emerged carrying two long metal staves, and tossed one to me.  I fumbled it briefly—my reflexes were slowed by weariness and lack of use—but I caught it before it hit the ground.  The woman gave me an unimpressed look before she adopted a fighting stance.

The metal staff was lighter than the wooden quarterstaffs I was familiar with, but the principle was much the same.  The woman and I circled each other, sizing each other up, before she struck forward with her staff and I parried with mine; and then the match was on.

I decided I might as well try to make conversation.  “And here I’d thought I would just be relaxing in a command ship directing a Chitauri invasion from afar,” I said pleasantly.

“I don’t know anything about what Thanos wants you to do,” she said bluntly.  She was quick, agile, and surprisingly strong, and I found myself breathing hard just trying to defend myself from her blows; I had barely tried to press any attacks of my own.  Out of practice, indeed.

“I see.  What do you do for Thanos, exactly?  Besides train new, er, _recruits_ for mysterious missions?”

“I do whatever I’m ordered to do,” she said, terse as ever.

“Don’t we all?” I said with a knowing smile.  She said nothing.  “May I know your name?  Or are you ordered not to tell me?”

She looked surprised for a moment and hesitated in her attack; I thought this might be my opening to put her on the defensive at last, but she recovered quickly.  “My name is Gamora,” she said after a few moments’ pause.

“Mine is Loki.”

“I know your name,” she said.

Of course.  “I’d kiss your hand, except…”

“I’ll excuse it just this once,” she said, the same grim expression never leaving her face.

Did she just make a _joke?_ I was so surprised that I let my guard down, and she managed to land a blow to my side.  It hurt some, but I was too pleased at discovering that my sparring partner had a sense of humor to care.

“Careless,” she said, her face impassive as ever.

“Yes, well, I am _out of practice,”_ I said with a sardonic smile.

For a few minutes we continued fighting without speaking.  The stone room echoed with the scraping of our shoes on the floor, the metallic clang of our weapons against each other and occasionally the hard clack of one end against the floor, our breathing—mine increasingly labored and beginning to rasp in my throat, hers finally (I noted triumphantly) showing signs of exertion.  I was tiring, but I also felt my muscles waking up after weeks during which my only exercise had been pacing around my cell and occasionally stretching to keep myself amused.  Gamora got in two more hits—one to my upper arm, another to my thigh—but I also succeeded once in striking her shoulder.  Finally, though, she rapped the knuckles of my right hand sharply with her staff, and I dropped mine with a clatter.  Before I could move to retrieve it, she had spun her staff around so that one end of it was pointed at my throat, as if it were a blade.  I raised my hands in surrender.

“You may rest for a few minutes,” she said imperiously.

I sat down on the floor with my back against the wall, while she remained standing, one end of her staff resting on the ground.  “Water?” I asked, panting a little.  She unhooked a small canteen from her belt and handed it down to me.  I drank half of it in one go.

“So, Gamora,” I said when I had recovered somewhat, “how did you come to be in Thanos’s service?”

“The same way you did,” she said, her voice carefully neutral.  “I was captured.”

“And what did you do before you were captured?  Were you a notorious pirate, like me?  Or were you a feared mercenary?  An infamous intergalactic assassin?”

“No,” she said.  “I was a child.”

“Oh,” I said lamely.  What does one say to that— _‘I’m sorry’?_ “So—Thanos trained you?  To fight, to kill?”  For I had no doubt, seeing the flint in her eyes, that she was capable of killing.

“He made me,” she said.  “He is—my father.  Or so he calls himself.”

“You mean, he made you the warrior you are.”

“No, he _made_ me.  He—altered my body.  To be stronger, faster; to heal more quickly.”

Well, that explained how she was able to beat me so easily.  “And I thought I knew bad fathers,” I said with an uneasy laugh—a weak attempt to lighten the somber mood that our conversation had abruptly taken on.

“You should not say such things of Thanos,” she said, her stern tone tinged with fear.

I shrugged.  “It hardly matters what I say; he can listen in on my thoughts at any time.”

Her face seemed to turn to stone, and I suddenly realized that I should have told her that from the beginning: Thanos could use me to spy on her, to see if she harbored thoughts of rebellion.

“Why do you say you have known bad fathers?” she asked flatly.  I wondered if she was actually curious, or simply eager to turn the conversation away from herself.

“My father by blood left me to die as a child,” I said.  I made myself sound calm and unconcerned, and for a moment I even felt that way, too.  “And my adoptive father—did much the same.”

“Then you are lucky,” she said with just the shadow of a smile.

“That I survived?”  Every day since my capture, and quite a few days before then, I had felt just the opposite; but I didn’t need to inflict my self-pity on her—especially knowing what horrors her life had contained.  “I think I’m just stubborn,” I said instead.

“Then are you ready to be beaten again, stubborn boy?” she asked, that ghost-smile still hovering about her lips.  She kicked my staff up with one toe to catch it in the hand that wasn’t holding her own staff and then tossed it to me, all in one smooth motion.

I caught it this time.  “‘Boy’?” I repeated.  “I’m probably a thousand years older than you.”  I used the staff to support myself as I stood up again, which punctuated my statement in a way I had not quite intended.

“Are you ready to be beaten again, old man?” Gamora corrected, a wicked gleam in her eyes.

She did beat me again, that day and for many days after, though I became better able to hold my own against her as I rebuilt my strength.  On my fourth day of training with her, I actually succeeded in disarming her once, though she disarmed me twice the same day.

She did not come every day; I might see her for four or five days in a row, and then she would be absent for a day or two without warning.  I asked her once, when I saw her again, why she had not come the previous day; and she only told me shortly that she came and went on Thanos’s orders.  I had found myself, curiously, looking forward to our training sessions, and disappointed on the days when she did not come.  She reminded me of Sif, the one of Thor’s companions with whom I might have formed a genuine friendship if circumstances had not intervened: the stern warrior woman, armed with a deep pride that she wielded as both sword and shield, underneath which lay a current of fierce pragmatic intelligence and a spark of wicked humor.  I had little doubt that Gamora, like Sif, had encountered many men who did not take her seriously because of her gender (this part of the universe, it turned out, did not really differ from Asgard in that respect)—men who had learned rather painfully that they were wrong to underestimate her.

One day, a week or so into my training with Gamora, I was feeling especially sleep-deprived from one of Thanos’s unannounced nighttime visits to my mind, and I was moving sluggishly as a result.  “You’re showing your age, old man,” Gamora said with that tiny hint of a smile as she deliberately rapped my shin with her staff (though she could have struck more vital parts of my body if she had wanted to), making me yelp.  Although I had not been using my magic in our training sessions, I was irritated enough that I thought I should teach her to have a bit more respect for her elders.  So I created a double of myself and, at the very same moment, made myself invisible.  She kept her eye on my double, which feinted at her while I moved around behind her.  Just as she struck at the replica, which faded upon contact with her staff, I hooked my staff into the backs of her knees and swept her feet out from under her, so that she landed hard on her ass.

I made myself visible again and walked back around to smirk at her stunned expression.  “One learns a few tricks in a thousand years of life,” I said smugly.

Gamora pushed herself to her feet, rubbing her tailbone, with an angry look on her face—but she was not angry for the reason I had expected.  “Why didn’t you do that before?” she asked impatiently.

I shrugged.  “It felt like cheating.  In fact, there are many in Asgard who _would_ call it cheating.”  And had, all through my life.

“It doesn’t matter what Asgardians think,” Gamora snapped.  “You need to be able to fight to _win,_ and that means using all the weapons at your disposal.”

“Oh,” I said, feeling a bit foolish.  I had been treating this like training in Asgard, which was as much about learning proper form and a warrior’s honor as it was about winning.  But I was being sent to conquer a world; there was no place for honor in that fight.

“I—I usually fight using throwing knives, not a quarterstaff or a spear,” I said hesitantly.  “I don’t suppose I’d be allowed to practice with those.”

“Why not?” she asked with a sardonic half-smile.  “Would you try to kill me?”

“Not you, no,” I said softly.

Gamora narrowed her eyes, momentarily puzzled; then she pressed her lips tightly together.  “I wouldn’t let you do that, either,” she said, her tone angrier than the words seemed to warrant.  I wondered if she was angry because she was starting to like me, as I had come to like her—or because (as I had speculated before) her life had been so full of horrors that she wondered what right _I_ had to contemplate suicide as a means of escape.

“I can get you some throwing knives and a target to practice with tomorrow,” Gamora said briskly.  I could hear her pushing down the anger in her voice.

“I have my own knives,” I said quietly, feeling somewhat chastened.  Gamora shot me a questioning look, and I explained, “I keep them in a pocket dimension.”

“Of course,” she said.  The tiny smile was back, though it looked a little tense.  “That’s why they call you the Magician.”

“You already found out why they call me the Trickster,” I said with a wry smile of my own.

“I’ll just get the target, then,” she replied.

Gamora kept her promise: the next day there was a vaguely man-shaped wooden target set up against the wall of our practice room.  “I might need more space,” I remarked: the room was not long enough for me to practice throwing from the distances I was capable of.

“We could use the hallway,” she mused, “and let the guards beware.”  She gave me a mischievous smile, broader than I had ever seen on her.  “So, Magician, can you pull a dagger out of my ear?”

“Let’s see,” I replied, sounding far more unconcerned than I felt.  I reached for the pocket dimension, and felt the familiar tug on my mind as Thanos felt me tapping into my seiðr; but this time he didn’t stop me, apparently trusting that I planned to do no more with the knives than practice my aim.  I breathed a quiet sigh of relief as I reached up toward Gamora’s face and pulled the knife out of its storage space right next to her ear.  “Did you have any idea that was in there?” I joked, with a slightly giddy grin.  I felt strangely _comfortable_ with the dagger back in my hand—as if my arm was finally complete again.

I turned abruptly and, without really stopping to aim, flung the dagger at the target, where it stuck deep in the middle of the outlined man’s face.

Gamora’s smile widened even more.  “Well, it looks like you are good for something after all.”  I flinched a little at the way her words echoed the pathetically hopeful thought I had had about myself when Thor first acknowledged my skill at knife-throwing, which Thanos had recently brought back to the surface of my mind.  But I recognized the playful spirit in which her remark was intended, and, trying to quash that flicker of pain, returned her mischievous smile.  “A few things, actually,” I said.

“Thanos is the only person I’ve ever seen who could do that with pocket dimensions—storing things and then pulling them out again like that,” she said, sounding genuinely impressed.  “I think I understand now why he wanted you to… do whatever it is he wants you to do.”

I snorted.  “And all this time you’ve been wondering why he bothered to capture this weakling—this weak old man to run an errand for him.”  _Weakling Jötun runt,_ I had almost said; but I didn’t know if she knew what a Jötun was, or the significance the designation would have for me.

“Maybe,” she said archly.  “Let’s move the target out into the hall, shall we?”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yup, that thing where Thanos is reading Loki's mind and Loki pushes him out and ends up in Thanos's mind was kind of inspired by the bit in _Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix_ where Harry does the exact same thing to Snape. Also, did anyone catch the _Sweeney Todd_ reference? I am such a dork.
> 
> What are these suppressed memories that Loki didn't want Thanos to see? I was starting to write them in, but I realized that the story was veering way off track. I'll finish writing them up at some point and post them as an associated one-shot.
> 
> 3/20/16: Edited to add a paragraph expanding on Loki's post-fall experiences as seen by Thanos.
> 
> In case you're wondering about the circumstances that prevented Loki from forming a genuine friendship with Sif, in my self-contained little fanfictional universe, read my story [Silver and Gold](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5047336/chapters/11606062). If you want more extensive quoting of Nietzsche, plus stoned Loki awkwardly kissing Thor to make a point, read my latest, [Desert Flowers](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5729293).
> 
> Please leave comments! Constructive criticism is important.


	8. Freedom in the Lack of Freedom

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thanos determines that Loki is ready to learn what he is to go to Earth to retrieve, and sends him on a virtual mission to spy out its location.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> After more than a month, an update! And in this one we get both my take on the end-of-credits tag to the first _Thor_ movie, and an explanation of where Loki got all that weird shit about freedom that he says in _The Avengers._
> 
>  **Warnings:** mind rape, psychological torture, Stockholm syndrome.

I had been training with Gamora for almost three weeks when Thanos decided to look in on one of our sessions.  We were practicing with the metal staves again—Gamora told me that Thanos wanted me to learn to fight with those in particular, though she didn’t know why; I had a suspicion (correct, it turned out) that it had something to do with the scepter—when I felt that alien presence nudging into my mind, and Thanos’s voice asked, with that sinister pretense of mild curiosity, _And how are the lessons coming along?_

“Fucking Hel,” I said loudly, and dropped my staff with a clatter.

Gamora was bringing a blow down toward me, expecting me to parry it; she was not able to stop her movement in time, and ended up striking me across the forehead hard enough that I cried out.  _That’s going to leave a mark,_ I thought, clapping my hand to my head; Thanos chuckled at me.  “Shit, sorry, Loki… what happened?” Gamora asked sharply.

 _Just pretend I’m not here,_ said Thanos’s voice lightly.  “Easy for you to say,” I muttered, as if he had spoken out loud.

“Loki?” Gamora asked again, now looking more seriously concerned.

“Sorry,” I said through gritted teeth.  “Thanos is in my head again.  He wants to see how the training is going, apparently.”

 _I’m waiting,_ said Thanos, his mental voice taking on a singsong tone of humorous impatience.

Gamora’s face turned grim and stony.  “Well, then,” she said, adopting a fighting stance, and then she struck.  While we sparred, I tried to pretend that this was just a normal training session (as if anything about my situation was normal) and ignore that lurking foreign _presence_ in my head, looking through my eyes, feeling my movements in my muscles along with me.

It was difficult not to be distracted, and I let Gamora get in too many blows.  Eventually I used my magic to regain the upper hand: I repeated the trick where I created a duplicate and made myself invisible at the same time, letting Gamora focus on my double while I crept around to strike where she was vulnerable.  This time, though, she expected that I would do that at some point, and she became suspicious when my double hung back, feinting rather than pressing an attack, delaying the moment when she would strike it and it would dissolve.  She spun around, trying to listen for my footsteps (I had silenced them, fortunately); and instead of knocking her on her ass again, I settled for disarming her by hitting her on the elbow.  “Damn,” she said, dropping the staff and cradling her tingling arm.

I reappeared and grinned at her triumphantly; but then she whirled around and kicked my legs out from under me.  I rolled and came up with my staff raised protectively, ready to block her when she came at me again with her weapon in hand.  The match continued for a while until, just for fun, I decided to create five simulacra and let her try to eliminate them one by one, looking for the real me.  The odds were not in her favor, and while she was distracted, I came around one side, reached around one of my own doubles to hit her on the wrist, and then, knowing the game was about to be given away, took the moment she spent deciding whether it was me or my double who had hit her to knock her feet out from under her as I had before.  She looked a little embarrassed as she raised her hands in surrender, but also, I thought, a little bit proud of me.

 _Very well done,_ said Thanos’s voice in my head, in his twisted parody of fatherly pride.  Suddenly I felt ill.  _Some other time I’ll have to watch you throw those daggers,_ he said, and then his presence, that horrible excrescence in my brain, was gone.

Shaking, I dropped my staff and sat down next to Gamora, who was still sitting where I had knocked her down, her arms resting on her knees.

“You would think that I would have gotten used to it by now,” I said with a weak smile.  “He drops in on me while I’m sleeping, eating, taking a shit… Sorry,” I said, suddenly embarrassed.  Gamora just rolled her eyes.  “But he’s never intruded on my lessons with you, and somehow I thought… I don’t know what I thought.  I felt like they were my free time.  A time when I could relax.”

“Relax?” she echoed with a little smirk.  “Clearly I haven’t been driving you hard enough.”

“No, that’s not it,” I said quickly.  “It’s that… when my body is working, I always know exactly what I have to do next; everything seems clear and right, and it’s… peaceful.  You’re a warrior; you must know what I mean.”

“Of course,” she said, nodding.

“But I can’t have that feeling of peace anymore if I’m always looking over my shoulder for him—so to speak.  And it’s… exhausting, to say the least.”

I knew that Gamora couldn’t say anything sympathetic: if she betrayed to me that she did not completely approve of all of Thanos’s methods, he might extract it from my memories later.  It was risky enough that she was sitting here in companionable silence with me; it held the dangerous suggestion of solidarity.

“I don’t know why I thought there would be any time when I could be free of him,” I said bitterly, scrubbing my face with my hands.

I heard Gamora inhale, preparing to speak, then pause as she considered her words.  “There is a kind of freedom in the lack of freedom,” she said finally.  “Much like the feeling of letting your body tell your mind exactly what must be done.”

“Hmm,” I said.  There was something familiar about her words.  After she walked me back to my cell, carefully not meeting my eyes as she closed the door on me, I reached into the pocket dimension with my books—trying to ignore that little tug as Thanos made sure I wasn’t doing anything untoward—and pulled out _Beyond Good and Evil_ again.  I flipped through it until I found the section I was looking for, the one my conversation with Gamora had brought to mind.

 _“188. Every morality is, as opposed to_ laisser aller, _a bit of tyranny against ‘nature’; also against ‘reason’; but this in itself is no objection… What is essential and inestimable in every morality is that it constitutes a long compulsion: … one should recall the compulsion under which every language so far has achieved strength and freedom—the metrical compulsion of rhyme and rhythm._

 _“…the curious fact is that all there is or has been on earth of freedom, subtlety, boldness, dance, and masterly sureness… has developed owing to the ‘tyranny of such capricious laws’; and in all seriousness, the probability is by no means small that precisely this is ‘nature’ and ‘natural’—and_ not _that_ laisser aller.

_“Every artist knows how far from any feeling of letting himself go his ‘most natural’ state is—the free ordering, placing, disposing, giving form in the moment of ‘inspiration’—and how strictly and subtly he obeys thousandfold laws precisely then, laws that precisely on account of their hardness and determination defy all formulation through concepts…_

_“Consider any morality with this in mind: what there is in it of ‘nature’ teaches hatred of the_ laisser aller, _of any all-too-great freedom, and implants the need for limited horizons and the nearest tasks—teaching the_ narrowing of our perspective, _and thus in a certain sense stupidity, as a condition of life and growth._

 _“‘You shall obey—someone and for a long time:_ else _you will perish and lose the last respect for yourself’—this appears to be the moral imperative of nature…”_

With a shudder I realized how much these words reminded me of Thanos’s words to me: “How can you hope to command if you do not first learn to obey?”  But my response was not, as one might have thought, to turn away from the text or slam the book shut because of the resemblance its ideas bore to the Mad Titan’s.  Rather, my response was to think that perhaps there was some wisdom in what Thanos said; that “though this be madness, yet there is method in it.”

 _“All there is or has been on earth of freedom, subtlety, boldness, dance, and masterly sureness… has developed owing to the ‘tyranny of such capricious laws’”; “what there is in it of ‘nature’ teaches hatred of the_ laisser aller, _of any all-too-great freedom”:_ with these words running through my head I went to sleep that night, and thought that perhaps my servitude here was not, after all, the great evil I had taken it to be.

 

* * *

 

The next day, for the first time in what must have been almost a month, the Other came to bring me before Thanos’s throne.  When he said his usual “My master requires your presence,” I asked, “Why?  He’s been content enough lately to communicate with me in my absence.”

The Other stared for a moment, apparently taken aback by my insolence; but then, instead of making a show of outrage, he simply answered my question: “He wishes to show you something too important not to be done face-to-face.”

“Very well,” I said, and followed him up to the surface of the asteroid.

“My star pupil,” said Thanos, who could have been said to be beaming at me were his face not so mocking and menacing.

“Yes, well, I have always been a bit of a tutor’s pet,” I returned, masking my wariness behind bravado.

“I know,” he said, and the truth of his words wiped any trace of humor from my mind, though it did not wipe the false smile from my face.

“I am told you have something more to teach me,” I said pleasantly.

“Indeed.  I think you have earned the privilege of knowing what I am sending you on Earth to retrieve for me.”

“And you needed me to be here for that,” I said, my voice very neutral.

“Not for that, precisely,” he replied.

 _I hope you won’t mind if I take a shortcut,_ he said, this time directly into my mind rather than aloud.  _Not at all,_ I thought back, filling the words with all the venomous resentment and shame that I was powerless to conceal.

Then my mind was filling with images and information—all about the Infinity Stones.  I already knew the legend of their origin and their names, Thanos quickly ascertained, so he moved on to specifics.  The Space Stone, called the Tesseract, was on Earth; the Mind Stone, which was in the scepter (my mind reeled at first when I learned this, but it did make a good deal of sense) had felt the calling of its sister stone.  It had lain dormant for years, but then the humans had begun tinkering with it, running tests, trying to determine how to tap its power.  The Mind Stone could lead directly to it, but could not determine what was around it, what kind of resistance would be met by someone who went to retrieve it.

“How far can you send one of your projections?” Thanos asked out loud, startling me.

“My… what?” I asked stupidly.  Why was he even asking when he could just dig around in my head for what he wanted?  Was this some sort of odd… respect?

“Your projections—your doubles—your simulacra.  Those illusions of yourself, through whose eyes you can see.”

“I… I don’t usually send them farther than another wing of the palace.  Or didn’t, rather.  I think the farthest I ever sent one was back to the palace from another region of Asgard.”

“Could you send one across galaxies, to another world?”  His eyes glittered with something like eagerness.

“I—I could try,” I said hesitantly.

“I hope you will do better than _try,”_ he said warningly.  Then the Titan rose from his throne, carrying the scepter (it seemed almost comically small in his massive hand), descended the great stairs to the pavilion where I stood, and extended the scepter to me.  I expected him to touch my chest with it, as he had before, or else do something further to interfere with my mind; but he just stood there holding it out.  _He wants me to take it,_ I realized, just as he barked impatiently, “Well?  Take it.”

I reached out to grasp the handle.  I could not get a purchase on it without letting my hand briefly touch Thanos’s; his skin was rough, like an elephant’s hide, and burned with a fierce inner heat like no living being I had ever encountered (I have not yet, thank the Norns, met a fire demon of Muspelheim).  But then the scepter was in my hands, the metal hot where Thanos’s hand had gripped it but smooth and cool everywhere else.  I could feel the power that surged through it from the Mind Stone, and I was reminded of the first time I held Gungnir, in the room where Odin slept, and felt its power singing from my hands through all of my veins.  I was reminded, too, of the last time that I held Gungnir, and felt only cold metal in my failing grip.  It had stopped singing to me; all its songs were for the true kings of Asgard who looked down as the farce of the impostor’s reign came to its foreordained end.

But this scepter and its Infinity Stone still sang to me, and its song filled my whole body with an intoxicating thrill.  “Reach out with it,” Thanos commanded me.  “Feel how the Space Stone calls.”

I closed my eyes and probed at the Mind Stone with my seiðr.  It wanted more; so I touched it hesitantly with a tendril of my thoughts.  It latched on hungrily with an alien intelligence, and seemed to want to drink my whole mind—almost the way Thanos did when he pulled my memories from me, but somehow both more forceful and more gentle; the Mind Stone would consume my whole mind and I, enraptured by its strange beckoning power, would go gladly into it.

Aware, now, of the danger it presented, I reached toward it only gingerly, holding myself back from its hungry grasp.  I spoke to it with my mind, with respect and command in equal measure, as if to a proud, spirited colt not yet broken to the reins; and hesitantly, a little reluctantly, it let me look through its eyes, so to speak (since, alas, I must convey all of such an experience only in lame, halting metaphors).  I could feel the presence of the Space Stone—far away, but not so far away as some of its other sisters, and awake now, seeking blindly for its kin, calling faintly like a lost chick fallen from the nest.  The Mind Stone was, in one respect, not blind—it could pinpoint the exact spatial location of its estranged sister—but in another respect it was quite helpless: it needed me to spy out her surroundings.  I do not know if it was the Mind Stone itself or Thanos through it whom I felt urging me to send my mind, my senses, to that place, to find the Space Stone and bring it back.

It was so distant that I feared I could not reach it.  I sent out my power as far as I could, to where the Tesseract lay, but was immediately thrown back by some barrier.  My double had dissolved instantly, I realized, because its (my) hand had touched the walls of a solid container in which the Stone was locked.  I had to aim _near_ it, but not quite so directly beside it.  I tried again (making sure I would be invisible to anyone who happened to be in the area), but I could feel that my double was wispy and wavering, and my hold on it shook as if the muscles of my seiðr were too weak and weary to lift it; around where it flickered in and out, I could see only dark shapes and shadows, and it seemed as if my ears were stuffed with cotton.

When I dropped my hold on the casting and returned wholly to the surface of Sanctuary, I found myself panting as though I had been trying to run all the way to Earth, not simply send an exploratory simulacrum.  I let the hand holding the scepter hang low at my side and, looking up warily into Thanos’s burning, expectant gaze, I admitted, “I don’t know if I can send myself that far.”

Thanos leaned forward, his blazing eyes narrowing.  “Don’t you?”  The question already held an ominous warning of the pain he still had the power to inflict, and he reinforced the warning with a little nudge at my mind, just a hint of that pain he had used to punish my disobedience in the past—a slight pressure in my skull, a slight twisting in my gut.  More pointedly, though (to underline that he was only sending a message, not really punishing me _yet),_ he searched my memory to find the lines on my back where I recalled feeling a searing pain when the lash came down and for days afterward—where I knew there would be a tangle of scars, perhaps turning pale now, no longer red and inflamed—and sent a little twinge of pain along those lines.  It was only enough to make me inhale sharply, once; but the point was made.

As always, the pain faded as quickly as it came, leaving only the memory, the threat (which was just as well for Thanos, since lingering pain would hardly have improved my concentration).  So I tried again, summoning all my strength and will and stubborn determination.  I gave the Mind Stone just a little more of myself this time, and let it help me reach with my thoughts across the galaxies to where the Space Stone lay.

And suddenly, I found myself in a darkened corridor with walls of gray slab concrete, lined with odd metal contraptions and containers.  There were two men in the corridor with me: a pale, soft-bellied older man, whom I had glimpsed from Hliðskjalf when I sent the Destroyer after Thor on Midgard (some sort of scientist, I thought); and a tall, hard-faced, dark-skinned man with an eyepatch, dressed all in black.

“—a gateway to another dimension,” the pale scientist was saying; his voice carried the trace of some foreign accent.  “It’s unprecedented.”  He hesitated.  “Isn’t it?”

The one-eyed man turned and walked further down the hallway toward a small metal table on which lay a silver case.  A hum of excitement from my connection with the Mind Stone told me that the Tesseract was inside; the case, then, was what had thrown me back initially.  The scientist followed him toward the table—he walked right past me, but could neither see me nor hear any sound I made—and stopped a respectful distance away from it.

“Legend tells us one thing, history another,” the one-eyed man said.  “But every now and then we find something that belongs to both.”  He had stepped behind the table, and now opened the case; the Mind Stone was practically singing in my head, through my bones, at the nearness of its sister.  A shimmering cube, rippling with blue light, rested in the center of the case, wired to crackling red circuits that held back its power; I could almost hear the Mind Stone wailing to protest the way its sister was chained.

The scientist gave a slight puzzled shake of his head.  “What is it?”

The one-eyed man smiled with a kind of knowing triumph.  “Power, Doctor.  If we can figure out how to tap it, maybe unlimited power.”

I (or my double, rather) stepped up just beside the scientist to get a closer look over his shoulder at the cube and the mechanism by which it was contained.  I could make little sense of the wiring.  For an unnerving moment, I found myself hoping that Thanos would understand what the mortals had done to restrain it, when he gathered the image from my mind.

As I stepped forward, I caught a glimpse of movement to my left, and turned to see what it was; but it was only my reflection in the open glass door of some storage cabinet.  I looked like Hel, but I knew it was not what my body looked like, back on Sanctuary; it was only the reflection of the hastily created double that, with desperate hope and the aid of the Mind Stone, I had thrown across vast reaches of space.  It was interesting to see what my subconscious mind had produced: my double’s face showed a swollen bump and a bruise on my forehead in the place that, a persistent slight throb informed me, was where Gamora had landed a solid whack the day before; but for some reason it (I?) was wearing the princely—or rather kingly—formal armor I had been wearing when I fell into the abyss, instead of the leather coat I had since adopted.  I gave myself a malevolent grin in the glass, and saw that my reflection’s teeth were cracked and stained in a way that (I was fairly certain) my own were not.  The Mind Stone, it seemed, had unearthed something strange in me, about the way I saw myself in my heart of hearts: still the fallen prince, the broken king, all his sweet and lying smiles now twisted, ruined, shown for the falsehoods they were.

But what did that matter?  I was in the presence of _“power—if we can figure out how to tap it, maybe unlimited power.”_ Maybe a path by which I could regain the power that had been ripped away from me, by Thor’s resistance, by his friends’ betrayal, by Odin’s rejection, and even now by Thanos’s tyranny.  “Well, I guess that’s worth a look,” I told my reflection, with an ironic quirk to my lips.

“Well, I guess that’s worth a look,” the scientist echoed, eerily.  I panicked, fearing that my guards of silence and invisibility were failing, that he had heard and perhaps could see me, and I lost my grip on the projection spell.

My consciousness snapped suddenly back into my own body, which still stood, slack-faced and vacant-eyed, on Sanctuary.  Usually I am able to divide my consciousness between my body and my doubles, but the effort it had taken to project myself over such a great distance had forced me to channel all of my attention into my distant simulacrum.

“Well, Loki?  What did you see?” Thanos asked in a low, intense voice, leaning forward eagerly.

“It’s in some sort of vault underground… the people who possess it have brought in an expert scientist to help them harness its power.”  I felt foolish and inarticulate, unable to describe adequately what I had seen.  I swallowed hard, then said something I had never thought I would say: “Perhaps you should take from my mind the things I saw and heard.”

Thanos’s smile was hideous in its triumph.  Instinctively, perhaps, I closed my eyes to brace myself for an experience that in some ways was not new at all—Thanos had pulled thoughts from me hundreds of times over the course of more than a month—but in one important way was unprecedented: I had _invited_ him into my mind.  The scene I had witnessed in the concrete hallway replayed in my head as Thanos viewed it—including my view of myself in the glass, and the thoughts that had attended it.

Thanos’s triumphant chuckle was as ugly as his smile.  “So, you finally see the appeal in the reward I have offered you for your services?”

“I believe I could make something of my reign of Earth, yes,” I said stiffly.

“Nature teaches hatred of any all-too-great freedom, eh?”

He was quoting, in mutilated form, the passage of _Beyond Good and Evil_ that I had found and read the day before.  I had not even felt him take it from my mind, had not felt him reading over my shoulder.

Thanos chuckled again at the expression on my face—disgust, I suppose, perhaps some dismay, but little surprise.  “You should use that when you go to prepare the invasion.  Midgardians are impressed by philosophizing, are they not?  At the very least you can take advantage of their confusion.”

“Perhaps,” I said coldly.  It was not the worst idea I’d ever heard.

Thanos nodded to the Other, who reached out to grasp the scepter, still in my hand; I relinquished it readily, still staring poison up at Thanos.

“You may go,” he said.  “I will call for you again.”

The Other escorted me back to my cell without laying a hand on me.  I felt as if a battle had been lost and won, and I had fought on both sides.

I thought of the way Thanos had warned me by sending a twinge of pain along the lines of the scars on my back.  It occurred to me that the purpose I had guessed for his puzzling resort to something so archaic as physical torture—that he was using my body’s own healing mechanisms to allow me dampened access to my seiðr—was not his only reason.  He was _marking_ me, by physical means as well as the psychological ones by which, day by day, he made me more and more his own.  Whatever may come, I would never be wholly free of him as long as those scars remained—which they probably will for the rest of my life, however long it may be.  They were the emblem of the power he held over me, a promise that however far I tried to run, he would call in his debts.  He would always call for me again.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, clearly this isn't the intended interpretation of the end-of-credits tag to _Thor._ I think we were supposed to think that Loki ended up in the SHIELD facility shortly after he fell (hence the formal armor and the looking all beat up), and maybe told Thanos where the Tesseract was in exchange for... something. I don't really like that reading, though, because I'm not sure how Loki would have found the Tesseract without Thanos's help, and I also like my idea that Thanos sought Loki out, once he'd shown himself to be a badass, rather than vice versa. So I made it fit into my version of things. Unfortunately, this doesn't give Erik Selvig a lot of time to do whatever he was doing with the Tesseract before Loki showed up (about a month and a half at this point, maybe). But it's my story, so I'm doing what I want.
> 
>  _"Laisser aller"_ is French for "to let go." And if you were wondering why Loki is quoting _Hamlet_ ("though this be madness, yet there is method in 't"), recall from Chapter 3 that Loki went to London in the late 19th century and spent a lot of time at the theater. This also comes up in my faintly Thorki-ish one shot [Desert Flowers](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5729293).
> 
> For more feelings about Loki's flogging scars, see my recently posted bit of angsty and not at all romantic Sif/Loki smut, [The Will to Power of the Weakest](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6063535) (in the same timeline/universe as all my other stuff, because that's what I do). I think it was because I was working on this chapter that some of the weird stuff about the scars ended up in there.


	9. A Mutually Beneficial Arrangement

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loki works on planning his invasion of Earth, takes a much-needed bath, and has some serious conversations with Gamora.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Chapter-specific warnings:** references to depression, suicidal thoughts, and past torture; worsening Stockholm syndrome.

“Thanos finally let me know what I’m to go to Earth and retrieve for him,” I told Gamora conversationally during our next training session.  She was having me practice fighting with both the staff and my throwing knives, using one or the other as the need arose (Gamora was wearing a light armored fabric so that I could not stab her anywhere vital).  She was armed with an electric wand that temporarily paralyzed me with painful shocks if I allowed her to get in a hit.  (Her first suggestion had been to use a firearm of the kind that my Midgardian opponents would most likely be armed with, but I told her I wasn’t terribly worried about those; their bullets cannot pierce far through Aesir or Jötun flesh, so they would be more of a nuisance than anything, like getting a very large metal splinter.)

“Don’t tell _me,”_ Gamora said, sounding a little shocked, as she dodged one of my knives so that it glanced off the stone wall behind her.

“Why not?” I asked, tossing the staff back to my right hand to try to press an attack with it.

“If Thanos hasn’t told me, then I don’t need to know.”  I had let my guard down briefly while switching weapons, and Gamora was able to give me a momentary shock; I lost my grip on the staff and it clattered to the ground.  “You need to be able to do that transition faster,” she told me.

“Shit, ow,” I said when I could move again, then bent to pick up the staff.  “You don’t need to know, or he doesn’t want you to know?” I asked.

“If there’s a difference, I don’t need to know what it is,” she said, deadpan, as we began to circle each other for another round.

Once I’d managed to hit Gamora in the chest with one of my knives (which just bounced harmlessly off her armor, of course), she allowed me (and herself) to sit down and take a rest.

“Do you remember what you said a couple days ago, after Thanos came into my head to watch us?  About freedom in the lack of freedom?” I asked her, after taking a drink from the canteen she handed to me.

“Vaguely,” she replied, looking guarded.

“It reminded me of something I’d read a while ago, in a book written by a philosopher from Midgard—from Terra,” I corrected myself.

“How long ago is ‘a while ago,’ for you?” she asked slyly.

I did some quick mental calculations.  “Not quite ninety years ago, I think.”

Gamora whistled.  “You’re looking good, for your age—though in general you look like shit.”

“What do you mean, I look like shit?” I asked, somewhat offended.  However else I had been changed in the time since my fall, my vanity was still quite intact.

“Well, for a start, your skin is even paler than when I first met you—”

“I haven’t seen sunlight in six weeks, what did you expect?” I cut in irritably.

“And the shadows under your eyes look more like enormous bruises—”

“I don’t think I’ve ever gotten five hours of continuous sleep in the past month, either,” I pointed out.

“And your face looks like the skin has been stretched right over the bones, with barely any flesh underneath.  It’s a bit grotesque, actually.  I’d hate to see what your ribs look like right now…”

“If you have a complaint regarding my feeding regimen, I suggest you bring it up with Thanos or his hideous lieutenant,” I snapped.  “But I don’t want to talk about my appearance.”

“You didn’t change the subject when I brought it up,” Gamora teased me.

“All right, it’s a point of… sensitivity.  But I was saying: I found the passage that you called to mind the other day…”

“Found it?  How?” Gamora asked, puzzled.

I pulled the book out of its pocket dimension, and Gamora laughed.  “So it’s not just weapons you store that way?”

“When you’re the son of a king, you never know when you’ll be trapped in an appallingly long, excruciatingly boring meeting of the High Council,” I explained.

“How terrible for you,” Gamora drawled.

“Don’t imagine that you envy me until you’ve experienced true, profound boredom,” I warned her, only half joking.  “It is its own kind of pain.”  I was not thinking of High Council meetings; I was thinking of days and years spent mostly alone but for the unfriendly company of my own thoughts.

“Very well, I won’t,” she said, giving me a strange look—almost wary, as if she feared something she had seen in my eyes.  “What did you find in this book?”

I read to her the passage I had found, beginning with _“Every morality is, as opposed to_ laisser aller, _a bit of tyranny against ‘nature’; also against ‘reason’; but this in itself is no objection…”_ and concluding: _“‘You shall obey—someone and for a long time:_ else _you will perish and lose the last respect for yourself’—this appears to be the moral imperative of nature…”_

Gamora listened with her brow furrowed, and when I had finished, all she said was “Interesting.”

I paused, waiting for her to say more; when she did not, I remarked, “Thanos thinks I should use that to persuade the Terrans to accept my rule.”

Gamora raised her eyebrows.  “It’s rather a complicated argument to present to the masses, don’t you think?”

I shrugged.  “I’m sure I can find a way to simplify it.  Or ‘dumb it down,’ as the Terrans say.”

“You really think they’d go for this kind of thing?” Gamora said, sounding skeptical.

“Thanos does, apparently.”  My mouth quirked into an ironic smile.  “Perhaps he, too, knows of this saying I once heard while visiting Earth: ‘If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.’”

Gamora guffawed once, loudly, then put a hand over her mouth.

“But in all seriousness, I wonder if the Terrans wouldn’t be attracted to a powerful leader who offers them a sense of purpose and direction,” I said.  I flipped to a later section of _Beyond Good and Evil_ and said, “Here, listen:

“ _Call that in which the distinction of the European is sought ‘civilization’ or ‘humanization’ or ‘progress,’ or call it simply… Europe’s_ democratic _movement: behind all the moral and political foregrounds… a tremendous_ physiological _process is taking place and gaining momentum… that will on average lead to the leveling and mediocritization of man—to a useful, industrious, handy, multi-purpose herd animal…_

 _“…the overall impression of such future Europeans will probably be that of manifold garrulous workers who will be poor in will, extremely employable, and as much in need of a master and commander as of their daily bread.  But while the democratization of Europe leads to the production of a type that is prepared for_ slavery _in the subtlest sense… it is at the same time an involuntary arrangement for the cultivation of_ tyrants— _taking that word in every sense, including the most spiritual.”_

“Uh huh.”  Gamora still looked skeptical.  “And what—or where, I suppose—is ‘Europe’?”

“It’s a continent of Earth,” I explained.  “This was written more than a hundred years ago, but from what I have gathered on more recent visits, much of Earth is now becoming democratized.”

“And you think he is right, this philosopher of yours?  That democratization prepares people to follow the rule of a tyrant?”

“Many philosophers have thought so, since the very earliest days of Terran philosophy,” I told her.  “They must have had some evidence.”

“Since when do philosophers need evidence?” Gamora said dryly.

“Touché,” I laughed.  “Anyway, I hope he’s right.  Willing subjects are much easier to command than unwilling ones.”

“But just in case, we still need to train you to conquer some unwilling subjects,” Gamora said, unfolding her long legs with the grace of a panther.  “So get up, philosopher king.”

I laughed at how she had unwittingly reinvented an expression of Plato—one of the great founders of Midgardian philosophy, in case you were wondering—and stood for another bout.

When Gamora was more satisfied with my speed in switching between weapons, she called a halt for the day.  Abruptly she said, continuing her earlier commentary on my appearance, “And your hair is greasy.”

I sighed.  “I do my best to keep myself clean using magic, but it’s not as if I’ve been offered an opportunity to bathe.”

“Would you like one?” she asked, surprised.

“Merciful fates, yes,” I said, sounding a bit desperate even to myself.

“And you promise you won’t try to drown yourself?” she asked.  Her tone was wry, but she still looked somewhat worried.

“The thought hadn’t even occurred to me,” I said, truthfully.  Realizing it felt almost as strange and unnerving as willingly inviting Thanos into my mind.

“Good,” said Gamora.  I stowed my knives back in their pocket dimension, we put our staves back in the storage room next to our little training arena, and then she led me down the hall, past my cell, to another room where, in little stalls partitioned by thin metal walls, water could be sprayed down from faucets near the ceiling.  From another little storage room off to the side, Gamora fetched me a scratchy white towel and a bar of yellow soap with a faint chemical odor; then she retreated into the vestibule of the chamber, on the other side of a partition that mostly blocked her view of the bathing area.  “I’ll wait out here,” she said.

“What, you don’t want to join me?” I teased her as I began to strip off my clothes and place them, half-folded, on a bench outside the bathing stalls.  I was quite aware of the way the situation could be read, and thought it might be wise to defuse it with a joke; and besides, I was curious as to how Gamora would respond.

Gamora snorted loudly.  “Did you not hear me say that you look like shit?”

“I’m wounded,” I replied.  I was, a bit.  She had no compassion at all for my poor vanity.

She sighed with a touch of exasperation.  “I’m sure you’re quite handsome when you’re decently well fed and rested.  Nonetheless, I am not interested; and I’m almost certain you’re not, either.”

“Alas, you know me too well,” I said with feigned disappointment.  Mostly feigned, anyway: I hoped that I had not permanently lost my ability to charm and seduce, and to pretend to an attraction I do not feel.  But I was glad that someone knew me well enough not to be fooled.

When I stepped under the warm water, I gave a sigh so loud and contented as to sound almost obscene.  Gamora laughed.  “Anyway, I wouldn’t want to stand in the way of your love affair with the shower,” she quipped.

I laughed, too.  “I believe it is true love.”

I still had no mirror in which to see the ravages that my time of captivity had worked on my face, but I did look down to determine whether the sight of my ribs was as horrifying as Gamora had imagined.  They did stand out far too sharply from the deep grooves between them; I could have counted them all had I been so inclined.  But I was not, so I let my gaze and my fingers wander down to the knife wound scar that marked my abdomen with a short ragged line, just a bit inward from my left hip.  If I had been Xandarian, I imagine, the blade would have pierced my kidney (as it was intended to do); but thanks to the toughness of Aesir flesh, it did not go deep enough to do any serious damage.

As I washed myself, of course, I could not avoid feeling the intersecting ridges of the scars on my back.  In an odd way, I was glad they were there, and glad, too, for the scars of my knife wounds.  They bore tangible witness to all that had happened to me since my fall; they gave silent testimony, to my hands even if to no one else’s eyes, that I had been marked by my experiences, that if I seemed changed it was with good reason.  Because mental wounds are not visible, I have found, people tend to doubt their reality, and to blame the sufferer’s weakness or vice for actions that in truth spring mostly from pain.  Here was proof that my wounds were real, if anyone cared to look.

 _If_ Odin _cared to look_ was the real import of that thought, if I am to be honest with you, and with myself.  It seemed to me, as I traced those scars with my fingers, that Odin had inflicted them on me, as truly as if his hand had wielded the blade and the scourge.  I certainly blamed him more than I blamed the petty rivals and nameless assassins who had stabbed me—and, yes, more than I blamed Thanos.  For them, it was only business, nothing personal: a threat must be eliminated, a hit must be carried out; an unwilling subordinate must be trained and disciplined.  But Odin had claimed to be my father, and then broken the promise of love and protection implicit in the words he had spoken: _“You are my son.”_ I could still hear him saying it, his voice sounding so old and weak and helpless, and I hated him for lying to me, with that voice as well as those words.

 _He claimed to love me,_ I repeated to myself, _and then he abandoned me to all that I have suffered since—he and Thor both._ My hate felt as warm, as cleansing, as comforting as the water that cascaded over my body, and I bathed myself in that, as well.  _Though I suppose they must have hoped they were abandoning me to my death,_ I reflected bitterly. _Just like Laufey._ I could hardly bring myself to hate him, either; he must have thought he was sparing me pain in the long run—the pain of countless illnesses, of stigma and loneliness, very likely of a more painful and protracted death just a few years later.

I wondered whether I still wished, as I had dozens of times since I discovered my true origin, that I had died on the ice as I had been meant to; and I found, curiously, that I did not.  Wonder of wonders: not only did I not have the active intention to end my life, but I no longer even wished passively that I had taken some past opportunity to die.  This hate, it turned out, was a marvelous balm to the mind.

I finished bathing, dried myself with the rough towel, gave my clothes a thorough scrubbing with my seiðr so that I would not be putting filthy clothing on a blessedly clean body, and dressed before I rejoined Gamora in the vestibule of the bathing chamber.  I did not use seiðr to dry my hair, as I normally would have done in Asgard; I wanted to feel my damp hair as a reminder that I was finally, genuinely clean.

“That took you rather a long time,” Gamora remarked with a smile quirking her lips.

“What are you suggesting?” I gasped.

Gamora blew some air exasperatedly out her nose.  “Only that I should let you shower more often.”

“You are a goddess,” I told her, taking her hand and pressing a courtly kiss to it.

“I’m not sure if that’s more or less of a compliment coming from a god,” she mused.

“I have met many goddesses, sweet Gamora, and in your goodness and mercy you surpass them all,” I said with the unctuous tone of an Asgardian or Elven courtier delivering the customary lavish praise to his hostess.  Gamora gave her most derisive snort yet, but it was combined with a laugh.  “In your fierceness and beauty as well,” I added, just to pile on.

“Don’t overdo it, or I’ll revoke your bathing privileges,” she warned me, pointing a threatening finger in my face.

I laughed, then dropped the courtier act and said, sincerely, “Thank you, Gamora.”

“You could have just said that in the first place,” she rebuked me jokingly.  “And you’re welcome.”

 

* * *

 

Planning the invasion of Midgard was a piecemeal affair, taking place mostly in my own head, with Thanos sometimes in attendance (and with the assistance of some paper, pens, and ink I also had stashed in the pocket dimension with my books).  Thanos informed me that it was possible to make a temporary portal using the connection between the Space Stone and the Mind Stone, but that it could only be traversed by the one holding the Mind Stone, and would quickly collapse once they were in the same place.  I would need to secure the Tesseract upon my arrival, and then somehow figure out how to build a larger, more stable portal through which the Chitauri army could travel.

 _What exactly can I do with the Mind Stone when it’s in the scepter?_ I asked, silently; Thanos had not bothered to summon me for this conversation.

 _Many of the same things I have done with you,_ Thanos replied.  _You can extract information from or channel it into others’ minds.  But with mortals, you can attain a greater level of control.  Not only can you wipe their minds blank temporarily and direct their actions—_ he called up my memories of the times when the Other had touched the scepter to my chest, first in the Andromeda on Xandar when I was captured, and again to lead me from my cell to Thanos’s throne— _but you can also shape their goals and desires for a longer period of time._

 _Useful to know,_ I replied, making a note to use the scepter on the pale scientist I had seen in the dark concrete hallway where the Tesseract had lain; he might know how to construct a stable portal.

 _Of course, you can also just use it as a weapon,_ Thanos added, almost as an afterthought.

 _Yes, I did notice that it’s sharp,_ I thought back, a little insolently.

 _The raw power of the Mind Stone can be channeled into a localized blast,_ he explained, showing me an image of a burst of light and force emerging from the end of the scepter.

 _Ah, I see._ I tapped my pen thoughtfully against the page, then finally asked a question that I had not yet thought, or dared, to ask.  _What is in it for you, if I conquer Earth?  Why would you not want me simply to bring the Tesseract back for you?_

Thanos chuckled silently in my head.  _I wondered when you would ask._

 _I suppose I thought it would become clear at some point,_ I said in my own defense, _but it still has not._

 _Could it not simply be a reward for your faithful service?_ Thanos asked, with an air of amusement.

I thought a derisive noise at him.

 _No, you are quite right,_ Thanos admitted graciously.  _I want you to keep the Tesseract safe on Earth for me, I want your possession of it unchallenged; and it certainly doesn’t hurt to have Asgard’s attention distracted._

 _You know Asgard can do little to oppose either of us,_ I pointed out.  _Since the Bifröst was destroyed, it will be costly to send even a single warrior to another realm; to send a force would be impossible._

 _Odin and his watchman see much,_ Thanos replied.  _If they are allowed to cast their gaze over the whole board, they may discern what game is being played.  But if their lost prince were to reappear on one square…_

 _…their focus would be restricted,_ I finished, catching the drift of his thought.  _They would lose the whole game trying to capture one piece._

 _Precisely,_ Thanos said with that sickly glow of false pride.

_So I shall spend my reign of Earth beating back what feeble attempts Odin can make at recapturing the Earth from me, and me from Earth, with his hands tied by the loss of the Bifröst._

_Yes,_ Thanos agreed.  _I trust you do not find the prospect off-putting?_

 _On the contrary, I find it rather appealing._ He already knew that, of course, from the surge of defiance and perverse glee that burned through my chest.  I quite relished the prospect of turning the tables on Odin, of holding myself tauntingly out of his reach, using all my skill in combat, strategy and subterfuge—everything he had taught me, and everything I had learned thanks to the exile to which he had condemned me—to thwart and humiliate him.

 _Good,_ said Thanos.  _Then it seems we have come to a mutually beneficial arrangement._

 _So it seems,_ I agreed, with far less reluctance or resentment than I might have expressed even a week before.

I continued my lessons with Gamora alongside my strategizing sessions with Thanos.  After our conversation about my dreadful appearance, she started escorting me to the bathing chambers after every second or third training session.  I also began to notice, over the next couple of weeks, that my twice-daily portions of food (if the term can be accurately applied to those tasteless protein blocks) grew gradually larger.  It was still not quite enough to entirely quell the feeling of constant hunger and weariness, but enough that I stopped losing weight and (judging from the way the valleys between my still-prominent ribs slowly became less deep) even started putting some flesh back on.

About two weeks after that conversation, I ventured to ask Gamora whether she was responsible for the increase in my rations.

She shrugged and replied, “I did mention to Thanos that I thought you were losing too much weight to fight as well as you’re actually capable of doing.  You were losing muscle, and I wondered if hunger was slowing you down.”

I stared at her for a moment, suddenly at a loss for words.

“I think I was right,” she added after a pause.  “I’ve noticed that you’ve gotten stronger and faster recently.”

When I recovered my voice, all I could think to say was, “How are you still so… kind?”

Gamora looked startled.  “I was tasked with training you into the best fighting form possible,” she said.  “I can’t do that if your body is in terrible condition.  Kindness has nothing to do with it.”

I shook my head.  “But it’s not just that.  You _are_ kind; you have been since I met you.  How, after all that’s happened to you?”

“I’m not kind,” Gamora said tightly.  She sounded almost fearful—no doubt of what Thanos might think if he knew I had said this.  “I am a faithful daughter; I serve my father’s purposes well.  That is all.”

Seeing how troubled she was, I did not press the point any further.  I still wonder, though.  There must have been a deep well of goodness in her from childhood, one that even the ravages of Thanos’s torture and manipulation could not drain dry.  I, on the other hand, have never been kind; it took only a year of trials, and three months under Thanos’s power, to make me cruel.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another pretty short chapter, sorry. The intervals between updates are getting longer and longer... stupid semester. Stupid dissertation.
> 
> The first little excerpted quotation from Nietzsche (the one we saw in the previous chapter) is from section 188 of _Beyond Good and Evil_ ; the other one that Loki quotes to Gamora is from _Beyond Good and Evil_ section 242. "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit" is a quote from W.C. Fields (and my dad says it a lot).


	10. Courting Death

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nebula takes over Gamora's training duties, unfortunately for Loki; after Thanos extracts more memories of Thor, Loki unwittingly discovers Thanos's motivation for seeking the Infinity Stones.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> After almost three months, finally, an update -- and it's a pretty long one, too (though not three times as long as usual). Sorry if the fight choreography is shit... I know nothing about fighting.
> 
>  **Chapter-specific warnings:** More physical and psychological torture, including continuing mind rape.

About a week after that, when my cell door slid open around the time of day when Gamora usually fetched me for our lessons, it was not Gamora I saw standing in the doorway, as I had expected.  Nor was it the Other, come to take me before Thanos’s throne for some planning or instruction he wished to conduct in person rather than disembodied in my mind.  Instead, it was a blue-skinned woman I had never seen before.

Unlike Gamora, who looked entirely organic, this woman showed clear signs of mechanical and electronic modifications to her body: her right arm was made entirely of metal; metal plating and circuitry was visible on the right side of her head and around her right eye; and, perhaps most disturbingly, a large metal plate rose slightly from the top of her hairless head, as if sealing a hole that had been made in her skull to operate directly on her brain.  Her eyes, eerily, were almost entirely black: pupil and iris merged into a large black circle that allowed only the smallest hint of white to show at the corners.  This, I reflected, would make it difficult to follow her gaze in order to predict her movements.  I counted myself fortunate that I would not actually be fighting her when the stakes were high.

As usual, I was sitting on the floor, reading, when she arrived.  If it had been Gamora, I would have stood up right away; but it would not do to show such immediate deference to this stranger.  “Who are you, and where is Gamora?” I asked, looking up at her.  I kept my tone merely curious, neither a challenge nor an accusation; but in truth, I was worried for Gamora.  Had I endangered her by telling her that she was kind?  If it was only that I had thought it, it would not matter that I had said it aloud; Thanos could have seen it regardless.  But had I made a terrible mistake by putting the idea in _her_ mind that she was more than the creature Thanos had made?

“Gamora was needed elsewhere,” the blue-skinned woman said shortly.  “I am Nebula.  Come with me.”

I did not move.  “Is Gamora all right?” I asked stubbornly.

Nebula looked bemused; but I was not sure whether her surprise was at my concern for a fellow slave of Thanos, or at my temerity in asking.  She blinked and tilted her head to one side, making her look like some large predatory lizard, regarding me curiously while it decided whether or not I was good to eat.  “Is she _all right?”_ Nebula echoed.

I paused, uncertain whether it was safe to explain, but my worry won out over my caution.  “Thanos didn’t—hurt her, did he?”

Nebula shook her head, looking almost angry.  “Gamora is Thanos’s daughter.  Why would he harm her?”

“Will she be coming back?” I asked.  I very deliberately remained seated on the floor, which by now was verging on insubordination; and Nebula, accordingly, was looking more and more annoyed.

“That is no concern of yours,” Nebula snapped.  “Come with me, now.”

At last I stood to follow her to the room where Gamora and I had habitually practiced.  She brought the metal staves out from the storage room and tossed one to me without even looking in my direction, but I still caught it effortlessly, thanks to the honing of my reflexes by more than a month of training with Gamora.  When she did turn toward me again, Nebula was already attacking.  I had almost expected something like that, and parried without a moment’s hesitation.

Whereas Gamora had fought with a grace and elegance that would have met with approval from the training sergeants of Asgard, Nebula’s fighting style was brutal and ugly.  She attacked relentlessly, turning even her parries into offensive maneuvers, so that I scarcely had time to breathe before I was put on the defensive again.  I did not even try to make conversation with her, as I had the first time I sparred with Gamora—partly because I knew that I could not afford to divert any of my attention, or my breath, from the fight, and partly because her forbidding demeanor indicated fairly clearly that she would not be receptive.

If Nebula had been any ordinary being, her brutal fighting style would have wasted energy, and she would have tired herself out quickly, but it seemed almost impossible for her to tire—no doubt a result of her bodily modifications.  I was not so tireless, and while I had not yet let her disarm me, I knew it was only a matter of time until she simply wore me into exhaustion.  I tried the trick of letting a double stand in for me while I, invisible, moved into a new position from which I could attack unexpectedly.  But that relied on my opponent allowing my double to feint back for some amount of time.  Nebula pursued the double without quarter and struck at it almost immediately.  When it vanished on contact, I did not become visible again right away, hoping for a little more time to reposition myself; but then Nebula began swinging her staff around wildly, striking out almost at random, in a way that no opponent of mine had ever done—because no fighter who had to worry about conserving energy ever would.  Thanos or Gamora must have told her that contact would force me to become visible again, as it dissolved my illusory doubles.  She was making sure that if I wanted to stay invisible, I had to back away too far to be able to strike at her from an unprotected side.

My best option was to try to anticipate her movements enough to hit somewhere below the swinging staff and hope that I could startle her somewhat with a blow to the ribs.  Not that I had any hope of actually hurting her enough to slow her down; I had already landed a few blows—not nearly as many as she had inflicted on me—and none of them had seemed to do more than annoy her momentarily.  But perhaps by chance, and perhaps because she sensed the disturbance in the air, Nebula brought her staff down to meet mine just as I was bringing it around toward her.  When our staves collided, I was forcibly returned to visibility and the bout continued much as before—with the exception that I was now pretty well out of ideas for how to get the better of her.

Not entirely out of ideas, though: I still had my knives.  Nebula did not seem to be wearing the armor that Gamora had used to protect herself against them, and I knew that Thanos would not let me summon a dagger if my intention was to do real harm.  I had noticed a point of vulnerability, however: there was a narrow opening in the elbow joint of her metal arm.  There was no way she would let her guard down enough for me to be able to slip a blade into the joint from close up; I had to buy myself enough time and distance to watch and calculate her movements, and then throw it.  But I also had to create enough doubles that it would take her some time to eliminate them all, looking for me.  Sustaining and controlling a large number might divide my concentration too much to allow me to take aim as carefully as my plan required.  However, if I just created a few and _spaced_ them properly…

I made five simulacra, since I knew I was capable of dividing my concentration over that many, and at the same time made myself invisible.  From the point where I had been standing, the doubles quickly spread themselves out into a wide semicircle with their backs to me as I gained distance from Nebula.  I needed her to be facing roughly in my direction, turned a bit to the side, because I needed to wedge my dagger in the joint at the front of her elbow while her right arm was extended, so that she would not be able to bend it again.

The doubles all feinted back, of course, waiting for her to attack; and she went for the one in the middle so that she could keep the ones at the edges in her line of sight, in case one of them was the real me.  I let her eliminate the middle one while I positioned myself and watched the movements of her arms.  Never taking my eyes off her, I reached with my seiðr for the pocket dimension in which my daggers were stored, and felt a jolt as Thanos stopped me for a moment.  But I kept my intent transparent at the forefront of my mind, and after just a moment, his voice in my head said _Clever,_ and the dagger was in my hand.  Thanos’s presence stayed in my head to watch through my eyes: perhaps he was curious whether I would succeed; certainly, he was prepared to “discourage” me (to use his word) if I tried to do anything with the dagger other than what I had mentally declared.

In the time it took me to secure the dagger, Nebula had eliminated another double.  The others stayed spread out so that she would have to target them one by one.  She went for the middle again, as I had predicted; I was already positioned at the angle where I could hit the joint in her elbow when she struck out with her staff.  I allowed the double to come close enough for her to strike with her arm extended.  Nebula’s staff went through the double and it vanished, just in time for me to confirm my line of fire and then throw the dagger, aiming by instinct as much as by sight.

With a quiet metallic _chunk_ it hit its mark, lodging itself in the joint of Nebula’s elbow, returning to visibility as soon as it struck.  She was turning toward one of the remaining simulacra and moving to pull her staff back in, to be able to strike with it again; and her movements were swift and automatic enough that the motion of bending her elbow was stopped short by the blade before she saw or heard what had hit her.   Her left arm was continuing the motion of pulling the staff inward while her right arm was immobilized, and she almost lost her grip on it entirely.  She just had time to realize what had happened and drop her useless right arm out of the way before the staff fell out of her left hand.  But she was still off-balance and not well-prepared either to strike or to parry effectively as I rushed forward and swung my own staff around to touch the end to her throat, as if it were a spear.  As soon as it touched her, the staff and I became visible again.  I tried my best not to smirk; it was not in my interests to antagonize her too much, after all.

The look on Nebula’s face as she acknowledged her defeat was one of cold fury.  “Clever,” she spat out grudgingly—an unnerving echo of Thanos’s remark.

“I thought so,” I said lightly; I could not resist gloating a little.

Nebula continued staring at me coldly, then wrenched the dagger out of the joint in her arm and let it clatter to the floor.

I stooped to pick it up, then stored it back in its pocket dimension with a touch of the theatrical flair of a stage magician making something vanish in a puff of smoke.  “You might want to protect that with some sort of armband,” I suggested in a gracious tone that could not conceal that my attitude was anything but.

Nebula bared her teeth at me in what might have been an attempt at a smile, but I suspect was not, then grabbed my arm and marched me back to my cell.

After that first day—which I suspect was something of a test—Nebula resumed what Gamora and I had been working on: fighting with a combination of weapons, against a combination of weapons including the electric shock wand (I believe Midgardians call it a _taser?)._ I adjusted to her graceless, ruthless fighting style, exhausting as it was; I found myself more grateful than ever that Gamora had managed to get my food rations increased.  What was harder to adjust to was the near-complete silence in which we conducted our lessons.  There was none of the joking or camaraderie that I had come to enjoy with Gamora.  Nebula allowed me pauses to rest and drink water about as often as Gamora had—they must have had instructions from higher up—but these, too, were completely silent.  We did not speak about our lives, or philosophy, or battle stories or even fighting tactics.  The only words Nebula ever spoke to me (or barked, rather) were corrections and instructions: “Come.”  “Too slow.”  “Your attack was weak.”  “You left your side unprotected.”  “Get up.”

I began to miss Gamora dreadfully—all the more so when several days passed and Nebula did not offer me a chance to bathe.  After a week, I finally asked if I might make use of what Gamora had called the _showers._

Nebula gave me a hard stare.  “Thanos did not say you could.”

“Gamora was allowing me to bathe every three days or so,” I said, careful to avoid any tone of challenge.

Nebula’s lip curled in a vicious sneer.  “She thinks she is the favored daughter, so she can do whatever she pleases.”

“Is she?” I asked mildly.  Just those few words had already allowed me to understand Nebula better than a week of fighting with her.

Nebula looked as if she wanted to spit in contempt, but she restrained herself.  “Perhaps for now,” she said poisonously.  “But I will prove that I am worthier than she is.”

 _Worthy—_ that awful word again.  _“I will have proved that I am a worthy son,”_ I could still hear myself hissing at Thor, and I felt pity for that boy who wanted nothing more than his father’s approval. I looked at Nebula, past the metal and the wiring and her strange dark eyes, and realized how young she was.  “Good luck with that,” I told her, with just a hint of a wry edge to my voice.

The hate in Nebula’s eyes was so powerful that I felt compelled to take a step backward.  “I’m taking you back to your cell now,” she said, every word bristling with icy menace.

Alas, I did not bathe for the last two weeks of my imprisonment.  I can blame that, in part, for my unsavory appearance when I arrived in Midgard.  Only imagine how much worse it would have been if Gamora had not shown mercy, and I had gone a full three months without bathing… I shudder to think.  No, my vanity _still_ has not left me.

* * *

Although Thanos had trusted me with the knowledge of my errand, and had been helping me—almost collegially—to plan the details of my invasion, he had not stopped intruding into my mind to extract and manipulate beliefs and memories.  On the contrary: he continued doing this at unpredictable times up until the moment he sent me across galaxies to Earth.  This was how I stumbled upon what knowledge I have of his reason for wanting the Tesseract.

I had never even dreamed of asking; it was daring enough that I had asked why he wanted me to conquer Midgard.  Besides, I thought I knew well enough.  Thanos was a conqueror; it seemed entirely obvious why he would want something that would enable him to build a portal to distant galaxies, as well as provide him with nearly unlimited energy for anything else he might wish to do—making and powering weapons, for example.  It was no concern of mine what other worlds he might wish to conquer, or why.  Some people simply want power for its own sake (and are unimaginative about the _kind_ of power they pursue), and it surprised me not at all that Thanos should be such a person.

It turned out that I was wrong about the nature of Thanos’s desires—though perhaps not, in the end, about their simplicity.

This came out while Thanos was mining my memories, yet again, for ammunition he could use in his efforts to turn me decisively against my erstwhile family—in particular, against Thor.  That had been his project from the very first time he dug into my mind, already beginning to claim it for his purposes on the same day that he cut his claim into my body with the scourge.  He was as certain as I was that if Odin could send only one warrior to stop my invasion, the only one he would trust with this task would be his own son, his most powerful fighter—and, no doubt, one of only a few who knew the true circumstances of my apparent death a year before.  So Thanos made it his aim to poison all my memories of Thor, to turn any love I had for him to vengeful resentment and hate.

And yes, I did love Thor; I had never lied about that.  I had spent all my childhood and my youth at his side.  Our playful fighting as children turned seamlessly to the practice spars of young warriors in training; the childish adventures that we imagined heroic blurred into dead-serious military campaigns in which we relied on each other for everything, and trusted each other with our lives.  Ties like that are difficult to break—even with the most catastrophic of revelations.  You must understand: I loved him even as I sent the Destroyer to burn the town he was sheltered in, as I commanded it to strike him down, as I turned Gungnir on him and prepared to pierce him through the heart with it.

And do I love him now?  That’s rather a personal question, don’t you think?  Yes, I have been telling you all manner of personal things about my past selves; but they are not identical with me.  We die and are reborn every moment.  We call those past selves “I” and “me” for convenience’s sake; we often feel a certain loyalty to them.  But it is only a lucky few—or a talented few, rather—who can look back on all of their past selves and wholeheartedly claim them as their own.

But I was saying—it had been easy enough for Thanos to turn me against Odin.  In fact, I had already accomplished most of the turning-against without any of his encouragement.  I had suspected, long before I knew the true reason, that he did not really love me—certainly not as much as he loved Thor.  I had thought it was perhaps because of my physical weakness, my preference for fighting with ranged weapons and illusions over combat at close quarters, my unfortunate tendency to alienate members of the court with my sharp tongue and my taste for mischief.  When I discovered the truth about my birth, however, everything fell into place: he had never really seen me as his son; I was just a pawn in a political game he was playing, or a bargaining chip, perhaps—a tool, in any case; and while devoted carpenters may love their tools, politicians typically do not.  I had already learned to look with contempt and disgust on my former hunger for Odin’s love and praise.  Thanos merely had to replay my memories of Odin, unaltered, in order to solidify my hatred, my certainty that he had never loved me.

But my memories of Thor he had had to subtly distort in order to dislodge the love that stubbornly persisted.  And even this late in his process of reeducation—barely a fortnight before I was to lead my assault on Midgard—Thanos still felt he needed to reinforce the lesson he had been teaching me for nearly three months: that Thor had never loved me, any more than Odin had; that my own love was weakness and folly.  Even then, when I was certain all my love had been burned away, Thanos kept pushing its bitter ashes back into my mouth to ensure that I never forgot the taste—forcing me to relive the moments when I had laid my love bare to him, and Thor had shown that he did not return it.

That night, when I was still bruised and exhausted from my first fight with Nebula, Thanos woke me with the first memory that I had pushed him away from, of my brief conversation with Thor before his abortive coronation.  I spent a moment thinking it was a dream, but quickly realized it was too vivid, too coherent, too true to life:

_“Ooh, nice feathers,” I say playfully, directing my gaze at the winged helmet that an attendant has just placed in Thor’s hands._

_“You don’t really want to start this again, do you, Cow?” he ribs me in return, glancing up with raised eyebrows at the horns of my own helmet._

_“I was being sincere,” I protest, pretending indignation._

_“You are incapable of sincerity,” he laughs._

_“Am I?” I ask mildly.  The accusation stings, though I would never show it.  “I’ve looked forward to this day as long as you have,” I lie, but the rest is all truth, and saying it leaves my heart feeling flayed and raw: “You’re my brother and my friend.  Sometimes I’m envious, but never doubt that I love you.”_

_Thor places his hand behind my neck, as he has done so many times through the years, and I wonder if he will tell me he loves me as well; but all he says is “Thank you.”_

_I wait a moment to see if he will say more; and when he does not, I laugh it all away with a jest: “Now give us a kiss.”_

_“Stop it,” he chuckles, poking me in the chest to push me away; and the moment is gone._

From that memory, Thanos and I followed a link of association to an earlier one, of the day one hundred years before when Odin called us to his study to tell us that he was planning to crown Thor before the century was out.

_Odin is trying to impress upon Thor the magnitude of this responsibility, and how much he will have to learn and prepare before he takes the throne; but I am only half listening to his words.  It has been centuries since I had any real hope that Odin might name me his successor, but the disappointment, even though it is expected, still leaves an ache in my chest, a leaden weight in the pit of my stomach._

_I am just wondering, not for the first time during this lecture of Odin’s, why he bothered to summon me along with Thor, when Odin, as if reading my thoughts, turns his piercing blue gaze on me.  “This will bring important responsibilities for you also, Loki,” he says sharply, seeming to admonish my earlier inattention.  His tone is gentler, though still stern, when he says, “You will need to be Thor’s strong right hand—and,” he adds, the edges of his mouth curving ever so slightly up with grim humor, “no doubt, sometimes his strong left hand as well.”_

_I give him a tight smile in return, and he dismisses us._

_As we head back toward our own quarters, Thor asks, “What was that business about you being my strong left hand?  And why did you and Father seem to think it was funny?”_

_I blow a sharp puff of air out my nose before replying.  “In some Midgardian cultures that do not use cutlery, there is a strict division of labor between the two hands: one uses the right hand to eat, and the left hand to, ah, wipe oneself.”_

_“Hmph,” Thor replies, sounding at once disgusted and indignant.  “So he is saying that you will need to deal with my messes, when I inevitably fuck things up?”_

_I find myself softening at this shadow of self-doubt from Thor, the golden prince, the favored son.  “It will be your messes I have to deal with, not necessarily because you have made them, but because as King of Asgard and Protector of the Realms, all messes in Asgard, and all inter-realm messes, will be your responsibility.”_

_“And are you prepared to take on this important responsibility?” he asks dryly.  “Cleaning up my shit?”_

_I slow my pace slightly and turn to look at him; after half a step more he slows down to match my pace and turns toward me as well, his brow slightly furrowed in puzzlement._

_“I am prepared to do anything for you,” I say, as earnestly as I dare.  “I hope you know that.  Even cleaning up your shit,” I add with a little mischievous smile._

_After a moment, Thor harrumphs_ _again, then says, “We’ll see if you’re still saying that after a few centuries of it.”_

_It hurts, some, that the only reply he made to my confession of love and loyalty was to doubt it; but I resolve to let that go, and try again—less earnestly, this time, shielding myself behind a mask of humor.  “I’ll still be saying it when you’re five thousand years old and I quite literally have to clean up your shit.”_

_“And why are you so sure I’ll go senile before you do?” he retorts.  “I’m not that much older.”  And then, too, the moment is gone…_

I was burning with shame and with anger, at Thor and at myself, and I could not bear to hear myself offer up my love one more time, only to watch him take it as no more than his due and offer me nothing in return.  I tore myself away from the memory, knowing the pain that Thanos would punish me with, accepting it because it was less painful than what I was seeing, only hoping that after punishing me, Thanos would not force me to return.

But I must have pulled away more forcefully than I intended, because I found myself once again in Thanos’s mind.  Just as before, pushing out of a memory of my (supposed) father reprimanding me had led me into Thanos’s memory of being reprimanded by his own father, so now, these memories of unreturned love led me into Thanos’s experience of the same.  They were only hazy thoughts, this time, nothing so clear as the memory I had seen before:

 _I see a woman, slender, robed all in black, and I know instantly that Thanos loves her.  Her face is half-hidden by the hood of her cloak, but I can see that her eye is a void of blackness into which I could fall and never return, and her elegant-featured face is pale as death—because she_ is _Death.  Thanos loves Death, but she does not return his love; the placid smoothness of her marble-white face is as indifferent as the endless void in her eye, as indifferent as her heart.  But Thanos, his own heart pierced through with a shining lance of hope, imagines offering her something: his hand, gloved with the Infinity Gauntlet, six colored gems gleaming from its settings.  She turns, she sees it, she sees me, she seems to smile, and something at once menacing and inviting gazes out from the abyss of her eyes…_

I knew I should not have seen this, and I braced myself for a pain far worse than the one I had expected simply for pulling away from his gaze.  But what pushed me out of this vision was almost gentle: a pressure in my skull that fell just short of pain, a twisting in my gut scarcely worse than a strong surge of adrenaline, a flush of heat over my skin barely more than I would feel sitting too close to a fire.  And yet this strange gentleness frightened me more than the pain I had anticipated.

 _You know what it is to bear a love like this,_ Thanos said in my mind, softly, silkily.  _Not romantic or sexual love, but selfless, unconditional love._ He was using two different words for “love” in Xandarian, which makes a similar distinction to the one that ancient Greek made between _eros_ and _agapē.  “You know what it is to bear an_ agapē _like this,”_ he had said—“bear,” not “feel,” because _agapē_ is not an emotion.  _“Not_ eros, _but_ agapē.”

 _You know what it is to be willing to do or suffer anything for another,_ he continued.  _To be willing to walk through fire, to pull down the sky, to flay your heart raw—_ I flinched as he repeated the words that my mind had put to my own memory— _and ask nothing in return._

 _Not quite nothing,_ I ventured, in spite of my fear.  _You—we—would still ask for the other’s love._   Still thinking in the Asgardian tongue, the word I used was ambiguous among the kinds of love that the Xandarians, and the Greeks, distinguished; the shading it had in my mind, I think, was closest to _philia,_ friendship, brotherly love.

 _Ah, but what living creature who loves would not ask for love in return?_ Thanos countered; he still used the word that approximates _agapē.  A god, perhaps, might know such a love; but no mere mortal could.  Or finite immortal,_ he added—meaning himself, I gathered, though he offered no explanation.  _No being of flesh and blood._

I might have pointed out that I had been called a god—but I am, after all, both mortal and made of flesh and blood.  _Even the most powerful, abstract, unfleshly god that has ever been invented is not capable of such a love,_ I remarked, thinking of the God of the great monotheistic religions of Midgard.  _He, too, demands the love of those he claims to love unconditionally, and grants salvation only to those who love him._

 _Very well, then,_ said Thanos, sounding satisfied, triumphant.  _A love that would offer worlds to the beloved, and asks nothing but love in return, is the closest thing possible to unconditional love._

 _Worlds… or Infinity Stones?_ I asked—foolishly, perhaps, reasoning that he would not remain silent forever about that part of what I had seen.

 _To offer the one is to offer the other, is it not?_ he replied.

 _I suppose it is,_ I agreed cautiously.  Thanos could conquer dozens of worlds with the Mind and Space Stones alone; with all six Infinity Stones he could conquer the whole universe, known and unknown.  What Death could possibly want with them, however…

 _And is this a worthy enough cause for you, Prince Loki?_ Thanos asked.  _Will you win me the Tesseract, that I may sway the heart of my lady-love?_ Thanos’s apparently good-humored jest held an edge of mockery, and beneath that a shadow of menace.

 _I will win you the Tesseract for whatever reason pleases you,_ I said lightly.  _To sway your lady’s heart, to save my own skin, to humiliate Odin… and Thor,_ I added, my anger winning out over the pain it still caused to think of him.

 _Good,_ said Thanos, still sounding threatening as much as pleased.  _I’m counting on your desire to save your skin, at the very least… or is it your sanity?_ Once more I felt those strangely gentle echoes of the pain he used to punish me; but then he gradually intensified them until I found myself bent double, clutching my throbbing temples and whimpering.  _You know what I can do,_ he hissed into my aching head; the words somehow felt as if they were scraping directly over a nerve, and I gave a little sob.  He used my memory to find the scars on my back again, and traced them with fire; I would have thought that he had opened all the cuts again, but that I felt no blood flowing from them.  _You know what I can do to both your body and your mind.  And I trust you know that you have not seen the_ least _of what I may yet do._

With a final surge of pain that tore an unwilling cry from my throat, he released me.  The iron tang of blood told me that I had bitten into my lip without realizing it.  My mind kept tormenting me with the ominous words with which he had dismissed me from my first audience with him: _“You still fear madness… But I will show you: madness is strength… It is your safety.  It is your_ only _safety.”_

Those words reminded me of something else he had said that day: _“We have both courted death—one of us perhaps more literally than the other.”_ At last I knew what he meant by that; but I still could not imagine what Death would want with the Infinity Stones.  And now I was going to conquer Midgard to secure one of them for the Mad Titan, so that he might win the love of his lady, Death.

Perhaps I was already mad after all.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For what may or may not be my views on whether Odin does, in fact, love Loki, see my little vignette [The Noble Lie](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6629869).
> 
> The joke about being Thor's strong left hand was inspired by a saying about the duties of the Hand of the King in George R. R. Martin's _A Song of Ice and Fire_ series: "The King eats, and the Hand takes the shit."
> 
> Loki's remarks about the God of Midgardian monotheism was partly inspired by a couple lines of Nietzsche (surprise, surprise): one from _On the Genealogy of Morality,_ Second Essay, section 20 ("The advent of the Christian God, as the maximum god attained so far, was therefore accompanied by the maximum feeling of guilt and indebtedness on earth"); and the other from _The Gay Science_ section 141 (which I once printed out and posted on the inside of a bathroom stall door in my college dorm, right under a Christian proselytizing flyer):
> 
> "What? A god who loves men, provided only that they believe in him, and who casts an evil eye and threats upon anyone who does not believe in this love? What? A love encapsuled in if-clauses attributed to an almighty god? ... 'If I love you, is that your concern?'* is a sufficient critique of the whole of Christianity."
> 
> *Quoting Goethe, who was commenting on Spinoza.


	11. A Practical Demonstration

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the final week before his invasion of Midgard, Thanos provides Loki with an opportunity to practice enslaving a mortal by means of the Mind Stone; with some assistance, Loki finalizes his "campaign" speech; Thanos presents him with a gift just before he departs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I was wondering how Loki was going to make his enhanced armor from _The Avengers_ stay substantial even when people touch it, because for the most part it's been established that his illusions dissolve when touched, and I've been treating that as a constraint. But then [mia_a03](http://archiveofourown.org/users/mia_a03/pseuds/mia_a03), a.k.a. @salty-dorkling on Tumblr, made the following [suggestion](http://philosopherking1887.tumblr.com/post/147325554195/salty-dorkling-philosopherking1887): "I don’t think he uses illusions for those? Just like when he summons and dismisses the Casket in the first Thor movie, I think Loki actually summons those bits of armor right onto his person, so they’re real and there, then banishes them when not in use." Which absolutely saved my literary ass, and turned out to provide an opportunity for more emotionally manipulative fuckery from Thanos.

We are nearing the point in the story where there is nothing new to tell: no doubt you have already heard the account of my thwarted invasion of Midgard.  But you want to hear my version of the tale, do you?  Very well; I don’t really have a better use for my time, and neither, I imagine, do you.

There were a few last preparations of note before I traveled to Earth.  The most noteworthy, by far, was that Thanos’s servants captured a hapless Xandarian to allow me to practice controlling the will of another by means of the Mind Stone.

The Other came to fetch me, unexpectedly; as before, it had been almost a month since the last time Thanos had summoned me into his presence.  I was apprehensive, to say the least—all right, I was seized with ice-cold terror—since it was only a week before that I had accidentally glimpsed the love that Thanos bore for his Lady Death, and the gift he hoped to offer her.  He had been in and out of my mind a few times since then, and had said nothing about it, but of course that promised me no safety.  I certainly would not put it past him to lull me into a false sense of security, and then spring some horrible trap on me unawares.

I’m not completely sure what I was expecting, but it certainly was not what I found when the Other led me up to Thanos’s pavilion: a middle-aged, slightly pudgy man wearing the Xandarian equivalent of what Midgardians call a _business suit,_ quivering and blubbering in the clutches of two of Thanos’s silent Chitauri guards.

His pathetic noises drew my gaze to him as soon as I emerged from the stairs to the surface of the asteroid.  I stared for a moment, then turned to Thanos with my mouth half-open and my question written clearly on my face.

“He is here to teach you what you can do with mortals under the influence of the Mind Stone,” Thanos said before I had a chance to speak.

“I imagine this will be a practical demonstration,” I said dryly.  Judging from the man’s appearance and his terrified whimpers, I guessed that he was not the galaxy’s foremost expert on the powers of ancient artifacts.

“But of course,” said Thanos.  “There is no more effective way to learn.”

His eyes shifted ever so slightly to meet the Other’s, and the latter herded me forward (there is no better word for it; he was not pushing me so much as leading from behind) to the very foot of Thanos’s throne.  As he had done at my previous audience, when I had reached out with mind and magic to locate the Tesseract on Earth, Thanos descended the steps from his throne and extended the scepter to me—handle first, this time, so that it was perfectly clear that I was to take it from him.

Once the scepter was in my hand, Thanos remounted his throne, and then directed his gaze toward the soldiers restraining the whimpering Xandarian.  Prompted only by that glance, and not a word spoken, the soldiers brought their captive to where I stood at the foot of the throne.  The Xandarian stumbled as they marched him roughly forward, and his terrified quaking intensified.

“To bring someone under your control,” Thanos began, schoolteacher-like, “you must aim the point of the scepter at his heart so that its influence will be dispersed throughout the body.  You know where a Midgardian’s heart is, yes?”

I bristled slightly at his condescending tone; but then, after a slight pause to recall my childhood lessons in anatomy across the Realms, I obediently recited, “Near the center of the chest, slightly to the left.”

“Show me,” Thanos intoned, nodding toward the trembling Xandarian.

I pointed with the cruelly sharp blade of the scepter, and the Xandarian began sobbing outright.  “Good,” Thanos said, pleased.  “And what about a Xandarian’s heart?”

Slightly lower, and on the right side.  I did not bother saying this aloud, but only gestured with the scepter while the Xandarian wept.

“Very good,” Thanos beamed.  “Now, reach through the Stone with your mind and your magic.  Feel how the heart lies at the center of the living system, reaching out to every part, drawing them all together.  Good.  Then send your mind and will through the Stone to that center, and let it reach along with the heart to every part of the body.  The body is a machine, and now that machine is a tool in your hand.  Every part of its functioning—perception, thought, action—is directed toward your ends.  You can look through his eyes, but even when you do not, he looks and listens with your aims in view.  Every thought he has is of how to achieve your purposes; all the knowledge and memory he possesses have value only as they can contribute to that end.  Everything he does is done to serve you; he will eat, drink, breathe even, only so that he can render you further service.”

I heard Thanos’s words almost in a trance, as I closed my eyes and felt the way my will pervaded the Xandarian’s body and mind.  I caught glimpses of his past life: his name was Ermann Fen; he was a businessman of middling success, well-to-do but not wealthy, in the middle levels of his company’s power structure.  He had no great intelligence, or talent, or charisma; all he had was his obedience and willingness to work.  He had been married, but his marriage had broken under the strain of his over-devotion to work and inattentiveness to his family.  He regretted it some, but knew it was for the best.  He loved his two children, in a vague way, and still saw them sometimes, but the best way he knew to care for them was to work as much as he could, to provide for their future.  He had been captured in a back alley in Xandar City, waiting for a dealer of stimulants that gave the user enhanced concentration for days on end, with little need for food or sleep (the effect is similar to that of the Midgardian drugs called _amphetamines)._

All this information rushed into my mind in a semi-chaotic jumble, but it did not feel as foreign and invasive as when Thanos channeled information into my mind; it felt more as if I had picked up a badly written book, or as if several scatterbrained storytellers were trying to impress different accounts on me at the same time.  I must have spent a minute or two standing there with my eyes closed and the scepter pointed at the man’s chest, letting my brain sort through what Thanos had told me and what I had just gleaned from my new thrall, allowing myself to adjust to having this strange sentient appendage to my being, as a vessel of my will.

At last I opened my eyes and lowered the scepter, and found the man—Ermann—quietly and attentively looking at me, awaiting instruction.  His eyes, which had been an unremarkable light brown, were now an unnaturally bright blue, glowing almost like the Mind Stone itself, in a crystalline or web-like pattern of threads that engulfed the pupils and almost drowned the whites.

I looked back up at Thanos and, swallowing my apprehension and distaste, asked, “What am I to do with him now?”

Thanos chuckled with what seemed like genuine amusement.  “Take him back to your cell with you.  Accustom yourself to being attended by a servant of this kind.  You will need to make many of them when you reach Earth: soldiers and spies, and yes, that scientist you saw.  They will know what you want almost before you do; you must learn how to take advantage of that.”

I felt a strange chill at Thanos’s last statement.  “How much can he—how much will they know of my mind?”

Thanos chuckled again, louder and crueler.  “They know your goals, and have some sense of your passing desires; but of your other thoughts, your memories and beliefs, they know only what you allow them to know.”

I breathed a silent sigh of relief, but still worried that I might accidentally let something slip—or that one of my stronger-willed Midgardian servants might be able to push into my mind the way I had into Thanos’s.  Not that it mattered what this weak-minded Xandarian prisoner knew about me; realistically, I was aware that he would be dead as soon as Thanos had no more use of him.  But if some intrepid Midgardian were to break free of my control… It was bad enough that they would be able to tell my enemies of my plans; but I certainly did not want them disclosing the darker secrets of my past.

“Is there any way that my sway over my thralls can be broken?” I asked, deliberately calm.

“You can release them with another touch of the scepter,” Thanos told me.  “Or the link can be broken if they suffer a sufficiently forceful blow to the head.  But only one hard enough to knock them unconscious will be able to break the connection; and you can always re-establish it if that happens.”

The thought occurred to me—prophetically, it turned out—that that seemed like a significant flaw in the system; but I said nothing more about it.

Thanos must have considered the audience concluded, because the Other approached me, holding out his hand for the scepter; but then, unexpectedly, Ermann stepped between us, facing the Other.  “Kindly keep a little more distance from him,” he said in the speciously polite tone of an official enforcing corporate rules of conduct.  He must have sensed my almost instinctive fear and dislike for Thanos’s underling.

I just barely managed to suppress a laugh; I think I allowed a stray snort to escape.  “It’s all right, Ermann,” I said calmly, but with the firmness of command.

“Of course, sir,” he said, nodding deferentially to me as he stepped aside again.  The Other bared his teeth, all but leering at me, as I handed the scepter to him.  He knelt to present it to Thanos, who took it back and re-ascended his throne, and the two silent Chitauri soldiers who had been guarding Ermann when I first entered the pavilion escorted us back to my cell.

I had no idea what to do with the Xandarian once I was there, though.  I sat down on the floor, as usual, and he too took a seat in a corner and looked at me expectantly, saying nothing.

I cleared my throat, feeling extraordinarily awkward.  “Would you like something to read?” I offered—before I remembered that he had no knowledge of the All-Tongue, and I had nothing written in Xandarian.

“Is there something you would like me to read?” he asked respectfully.

I thought quickly, and after a few moments I alighted, relieved, on an idea.  “I’m planning what I should say to the Midgardians—the Terrans, rather—to convince them to submit to my rule.  Perhaps you could listen to what I have written and tell me whether you think it persuasive.”

“I’d be happy to, sir,” Ermann said with almost painful earnestness, as his face positively lit up at the prospect of making himself useful.  I wasn’t certain how much of it was the sway of the Mind Stone and how much was his naturally subservient, eager-to-please personality.

I reached into my pocket dimension for a sheaf of papers, a pen, and a bottle of ink.  As I had expected, I felt Thanos’s tug at my mind as I reached for the writing materials, but as soon as he saw what I was doing he withdrew again, with a little mental nudge that felt like approval.

I stared down at what I had written, perhaps two days before, with a very odd sense of déjà vu (yes, that’s a Midgardian expression; evocative, isn’t it?): I felt strangely anxious, as if I were an adolescent again, preparing to show Thor or my mo— or Frigga an essay I had written for my tutor.  This was some Xandarian nonentity, for Urðr’s sake, and one bespelled to my service besides!  I shook my head slightly to try to dispel the feeling, cleared my throat, and read out in the most authoritative tone I could manage:

_“You think that freedom means being able to do whatever you want.  But look at yourselves: you are slaves to your own conflicting desires, pulled this way and that by the fleeting whims of each moment.  How can you be free if you do not even know what you want?_

_“That is not true freedom—the mere liberty of indifference, the possibility of doing otherwise.  This is what_ true _freedom means: knowing exactly what you must do at every moment; never needing to choose, because there is only one thing to be done; the marriage in actuality of possibility and necessity.  It is the freedom of the athlete caught up in the race, the freedom of the artist with creation flowing effortlessly from her fingertips in the moment of inspiration._

 _“But such freedom is not a right, cannot be merely given; true freedom must be_ learned, _and the only way to learn it is through long obedience to the commands of a law, or a god, or a king.  These commands may seem arbitrary, but what is_ not _arbitrary—what is necessary above all, demanded by the law of Nature, of_ your _nature—is the obedience itself.  Let me be your law, your god, and your king, and I will teach you this true freedom.  Obey me, that you may learn what it truly means to obey yourselves.”_

I looked up, and found Ermann still staring at me with polite attentiveness, but looking rather nonplussed.  “Well?” I said, slightly irritated.

“It sounds beautiful, sir,” he said sincerely, “but I’m sorry to say I don’t quite understand the idea, and I suspect most Terrans won’t, either.  You do have to keep your audience in mind, and your audience is the general public.”

“More’s the pity,” I muttered.

“Perhaps you should simplify the message a bit, sir.  If you don’t mind my saying.”

“Of course I don’t mind; I did ask for your opinion, after all.”  My impatient tone can’t have been reassuring, though.

 _He’s entirely correct,_ Thanos abruptly chimed in from inside my head, startling me into dropping the pen and paper (though I fumblingly caught it before it reached the ground).

Ermann noticed my discomposure, though he could not sense what had caused it.  “What’s the matter, sir?” he asked, concerned.

“Thanos just dropped into my head,” I said flatly.  He shuddered in sympathy, for which I was almost grateful.

I sighed, and returning to the topic of my speech, asked, “So—I should dumb it down some more?”

“I’m afraid so, sir,” Ermann said, while Thanos agreed: _Definitely dumb it down._

I sighed again, gazing at my own useless words on the page.  I could have just set it aside, or crumpled it up and tossed it into a pocket dimension for disposal.  But I was feeling more dramatic than that, so I lit a small flame at the tip of my finger, touched it to the corner of the page, and watched it blacken and fall away to ash little by little, until the flame neared my hand and I had to drop the rapidly shrinking remnant to the floor, and then I dismissed the small pile of ash into a pocket dimension and collapsed it, scattering the tiny amount of energy contained in it through the vastness of space.

Ermann was gaping openly, and Thanos was silently chuckling at me.  I wanted to tell him to fuck off, and he instantly knew that I wanted to, so I did.

I drafted several more versions of the speech over the course of the next few days, running each one by Ermann (and sometimes, unintentionally, Thanos) to determine whether it was worded simply enough for the masses, but still compelling, with an air of command and not of entreaty.  Ermann did not have many talents, it was true, but he had spent some time in the public relations branch of his company, and besides that had spent a good deal of his professional life drafting memos to his subordinates; so he had a fair sense for how to communicate with an indifferently educated audience.

By the fourth day, I had a version that Ermann (and Thanos) approved of, and I set about memorizing it, and practicing my delivery before a gathered crowd.  I was still not entirely satisfied with the content—it struck me as heavy-handed and simplistic in its logic—but my critics assured me that the people of Earth would be appropriately awed and intimidated by it.

I shook my head and repeated to myself what I had said to Gamora some weeks before: “‘If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.’”

Ermann heard me and laughed.  “Good one, sir,” he said.  I don’t think he was just acting the toady.

“I didn’t make that up,” I told him.  “I heard it once on Terra.”

“Oh!  Perhaps the Terrans are cleverer than I thought,” he allowed.

“Some of them are,” I acknowledged.  “Most of them aren’t.”

* * *

I almost grew to like Ermann, in the way one might become attached to an affectionate, docile, unusually intelligent dog.  I found myself feeling sorry that Thanos would kill him (or have him killed, rather; he probably didn’t merit a finger-twitch from Thanos himself).

The first evening that he stayed in my cell, the guard brought two of the tasteless protein blocks: one of the usual size for me, and one half as large for my Xandarian companion.  Ermann, though, sensed my persistent hunger, and the rueful way I regarded my portion—which was larger than it had been before Gamora’s intervention, but still small enough to leave me feeling perpetually starved.  Without a word, he broke off about half of his pitifully small meal and held it out to me with a silent plea in his eerily blue eyes.

I may have been able to keep the longing from showing on my face, but that was useless when Ermann could feel it through the connection forged by the Mind Stone.  Nonetheless, I told him firmly, “No, you should eat it.  You won’t be able to serve me well if you’re weakened by hunger.”

Ermann looked skeptical, but he ate his protein block anyway.  He grimaced at the taste, and I laughed; I understood all too well.

The next day, when our morning meal arrived, he looked at me questioningly, but said nothing.  I gave him a curt nod to tell him to eat what was his, and he obeyed, though he looked somewhat reluctant.

When Nebula arrived to fetch me for my training session and I rose to go with her, Ermann stood up with me.  He positioned himself between us as he had done with the Other the day before—probably sensing, once more, my wariness and dislike—though he did not speak warningly to her.  Nebula stared at him, bemused, but he held his ground; then she turned her unblinking gaze to me, silently ordering me to call my dog to heel.

“She means me no harm,” I assured Ermann soothingly—if not, perhaps, with full conviction.  He looked skeptical.  “Stay here and wait for me,” I ordered.  “I will be back in just a few hours.”

Ermann hesitated, still standing between me and Nebula.  Sharpening my tone, I asked, “You don’t know how to fight, do you?”

“No, sir,” he admitted.

“Then stay here,” I said harshly.  “If you come with me you’ll only get in the way.”  Especially (I did not add) if he did this protective act again at any sign of my mistrust toward Nebula.  Looking chastened and a bit forlorn, Ermann backed away and sat down again in his usual corner.

As soon as I returned, Ermann stood up quickly and looked me over, seemingly checking for injury.  I was bruised, as usual, and limping slightly from a blow to my hip.  “Are you all right, sir?” Ermann asked anxiously.

His solicitude struck me as utterly absurd, and I almost snapped at him; but I considered that it was hardly his fault, and reined in my annoyance.  “Yes, I’m fine,” I said evenly.  This assurance would have been more convincing if I hadn’t sat down so gingerly, and if I had managed to contain my slight wince when my hip met the floor.

After our evening meal had been delivered, Ermann once again broke off half of his portion and held it out to me.  The expression in his eyes this time was neither question nor plea; rather, it looked something like a demand.

I finally did snap at him.  “I told you to keep it.  You’re useless to me if you starve.”

At my rebuke, Ermann’s shoulders pulled in a bit, like a plant wilting, or a turtle trying to withdraw into its shell; but he stood firm.  “I’m not much use to you as it is,” he said frankly, with only the merest hint of self-pity.  “I can’t fight for you; I can’t protect you.  All I can do is sit here and critique your writing, and I don’t need much energy for that.  And I can do this—I can give you more energy, more strength to fight.  Which might end up protecting you anyway.”

I looked into his unnaturally blue eyes, and suddenly found a lump rising into my throat.  Not because I was moved, exactly; rather, because I wanted to feel moved, but could not justify it.  This loyalty, this love, this willingness to sacrifice for me—all of it was a lie; but it was all of love and loyalty that I had ever known.  Thor had enjoyed it in abundance: from Sif, from the Warriors Three, from thousands of soldiers whose names he did not know, and from me above all; the Norns know how much.  But Thor’s friends were never mine; Asgard’s soldiers did not love me, but called me coward and sorcerer and _argr_ behind my back.  And Thor—Thor had turned away from me, betrayed me, shown all his apparent love to be counterfeit.  Gamora had shown me kindness, to be sure, but it was not love, and it was always mixed with pity.  I could only inspire love or loyalty, it seemed, with the coercive assistance of the Mind Stone.

But enough of self-pity.  I took the proffered food and said quietly, sincerely, “Thank you.”  Ermann’s answering smile was radiant with pride and with his own gratitude.

So passed the last week of my imprisonment on Sanctuary.  With the added nutrition, I fared somewhat better in my sparring matches with Nebula, and perhaps appeared a little less gaunt when I arrived in Midgard than I might have otherwise.  Ermann grew weaker and more tired, and spent a great deal of time sleeping—which was just as well, because once he had approved the final draft of my speech, I had little use for him, other than as a rather dull conversation partner.

At last the day arrived when I was to leave for Midgard, though I did not know it until I was already before Thanos’s throne on the surface of Sanctuary.  The Other came to retrieve me, with his usual, “My Master requires your presence”—adding “Leave that one” with a dismissive glance toward Ermann.  I did not say anything to Ermann before I left; I only turned and gave him a short nod to confirm that he should stay.  Later I felt a little pang of regret that I did not know to say farewell to him before my departure and his inevitable death.

When the Other escorted me up to Thanos’s pavilion, I was expecting another lesson in the use of the Mind Stone, or another session of planning for the invasion, or perhaps another surveillance visit via simulacrum to the place where the Tesseract was kept.  But no; the first thing Thanos said to me when I came into his presence was: “The portal through the Space Stone is complete.  You will go to Earth today.”

I was overtaken by such a surge of surprise and apprehension that all I managed to say was “Oh.”

“A few final things before you go.  The distance is great enough that my connection to your mind through the Mind Stone will be all but broken, so I will not be able to monitor your progress as closely as I have hitherto.  And besides, other matters have arisen that will require my attention.  Therefore, the task of supervising your invasion will fall to my lieutenant.”  He nodded to the Other, who bared his teeth in his habitual threatening leer.

“He will not be able to look directly into your mind without your cooperation,” Thanos continued.  “But he can still communicate with you through the Mind Stone if you, at the same time, reach out to him.  And he can still send feelings of… _discomfort_ directly into your brain at any time.  With that in mind: I expect you to report to him every twenty-four hours—which is the length of an Earth day.  At the end of each Earth day, he will reach out to you through the connection between you—which he will establish before you depart—and he will expect you to reach out as well.  After an hour has passed since the appointed time of contact, he will send a _reminder_ that you may find unpleasant; and after each hour that passes, the reminders will grow increasingly unpleasant.”

“And what if the work I am doing to prepare the invasion makes it impossible to provide a report at the appointed time?” I asked coldly.

“Within an hour, you must make contact, however briefly, and indicate that you are occupied with your duties; and then you will have another twelve hours to make contact again and give a full report on the success of your efforts.  If you fail to do so… the reminder you receive will be very unpleasant indeed.”

I felt my mouth grow dry and slightly numb, and suppressed a shudder.  I had no doubt that “unpleasant” was as great an understatement as saying that Thanos was not a paragon of beauty.  Or that I had grown up under a slight misapprehension as to my place in the world.

At a barely perceptible signal from Thanos, the Other stepped forward to the foot of the throne, and Thanos handed the scepter down to him.  Then the Other strode back toward me.  I closed my eyes as he pressed the point of the scepter to my chest, and a link like the one that bound me to Thanos stretched itself between my mind and his.  When I felt the pressure of the blade leave my chest and opened my eyes, the Other bared his teeth at me again, all too meaningfully.  Then he held the scepter out to me and I took it, carefully avoiding touching his eerie white six-fingered hand as I did.

The Other took several steps backward, lowering his head deferentially to Thanos, and I turned my eyes up toward the great throne.  Thanos’s gaze was fixed on me with burning, purposeful intensity.  I steeled myself and met it firmly.

“I have a gift for you, before you go,” Thanos said, almost a purr.  His low voice, its parody of gentleness feeling more like a threat, seemed to scrape like a razor blade down the very bones of my spine.

“A gift,” I repeated, wary.

Another invisible signal, and the Other hurried forward again.  Thanos pulled several items out of a pocket dimension (with no theatrical flair at all, uncharacteristically): a rich green cloak—the very same color as my old one, the one I had had cut up to line my coat—flowing from one golden pauldron, matching the ancient Kree one that I had taken to wearing, and one simpler golden frame; two upper-arm guards, engraved with the same patterns as my vambraces.  The last item he produced was a horned helmet, similar to the one I had worn as a prince of Asgard, but not identical: the horns were longer and curved farther forward, crueler and more menacing.  I almost felt myself choke when I saw it, though with what feeling—nostalgia? joy? regret? nausea?—it was hard to tell.

The Other took these “gifts” from Thanos and brought them to where I stood unmoving, mired in the sudden surge of memories and conflicting emotions, dumbly clutching the scepter like a spar rising from the flood.  I shook myself out of it as he began to buckle the armguards around my shoulders and elbows.  I stood straight-backed and dignified, holding Thanos’s gaze, as the Other buckled the pauldron onto the left shoulder panel of my coat, and the golden frame onto the Kree pauldron on my right shoulder; gleaming gold plating hung down from the shoulder pieces onto my chest.  At last, I drew myself up, proud and regal, as the Other placed the helmet on my head.

Thanos smiled, broad and self-satisfied.  “Like a king,” he said, simply, without elaboration.  But he provided the context and color for it in my mind, an insinuation so subtle that I scarcely even felt a nudge to announce his intervention.  _“Really, how do I look?”_ said Thor’s voice, quiet and slightly anxious, in my head.

My heart clenched; my jaw clenched at the same time, a sympathetic echo.  “That may be,” I said, forcing my voice to come out hard and cold, “but I suspect that most of the time, all this frippery will only get in the way.”

“That’s why you’ll store it in a pocket dimension,” Thanos said as if this were obvious, “and put it on only when you need to make a truly dramatic impression.”

I gathered my magical strength and, without lifting a finger, pushed my new finery into a pocket dimension, laid out precisely as it was; when I summoned it again, it would already be arrayed on my body.  (Yes, I have always had a feel for the choreography of pageantry.)

“Perfect,” said Thanos, still with that self-satisfied grin.  “Now: to enter the portal.  Reach out with the Mind Stone again; feel for the pull of the Space Stone.”

I did as he commanded, as I had done when I spied out the location of the Tesseract.  But this time it was not only a faint calling, a tug at my attention.  This time I felt the Space Stone beckoning me, body and mind, drawing me toward it.  I glanced up at Thanos, looking for instructions.

“Let yourself go into it,” Thanos ordered.  “Give yourself to the Mind Stone; throw yourself into the current that runs between them; let it carry you to where the Space Stone is.”

I closed my eyes and felt for the Mind Stone’s strange, hungry intelligence—hungry both to pull me into itself and to be reunited with its sister Infinity Stone.  I pushed down my lingering fear of losing myself in the Mind Stone’s hypnotic power; I imagined drawing my thoughts together into a tight, self-contained knot so that the Mind Stone could not unravel them, unravel me.  Then I threw my mind wholly into its bright, electric whirlpool, and instantly found myself drawn violently into the portal through space.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OK, next chapter we finally get the invasion of Midgard and the events of _The Avengers._ Sorry if this chapter was a bit of a slow-down, but when I was thinking about how Thanos would prepare Loki for the invasion, it did occur to me that it would be a good idea to give him some practice with Mind Stone-mediated mind control.


	12. An Impressively Menacing Entrance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loki arrives on Earth, recruits his advance troops, secures a base of operations, and takes a nap.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I made up names for some of the random people Loki has working for him. Please let me know if they already have names I didn't know about.

The experience of traveling through the portal between Sanctuary and Midgard was one of the most physically unpleasant I have ever endured—exceeded only, I think, by three others: my scourging at the hands of Thanos’s servants; the punishments for the two occasions when I accidentally glimpsed Thanos’s own thoughts and memories; and a certain incident, early in my years as a warrior, when I was captured by enemies and subjected to torture.  It was similar to the experience of falling through the wormhole created by the collapsed Bifröst—a feeling as of being simultaneously crushed by immense pressure from without and torn apart by immense pressure from within—but far more severe.  I am uncertain, however, whether this was because the wormhole still maintained some of the shields that protected users of the Bifröst when it was intact, or because I had cared far less about the pain when my intention was to die.  I kept a white-knuckled grip on the scepter, which seemed to be propelling me through the portal to the Tesseract, and fought down the nausea brought on by pain (not least because I had no idea what would happen if I vomited while in the middle of the portal).

Abruptly the pressure lifted, and I landed on a hard surface, off-balance, so that I fell to one knee, bracing myself with the hand that was not still clutching the scepter.  I could see little of my surroundings, veiled as I was by a cloud of luminous mist, but I heard footsteps and muffled voices from beyond it, and knew I was not alone.  I knew I needed to make an impressively menacing entrance, so I straightened a little, took my bracing hand off the floor, breathed deeply, and willed myself again not to vomit (which would hardly have enhanced my fearsome god-like aura), though I could still feel the tingling numbness of my blood-drained face and the layer of cold sweat that covered it.  I was still kneeling when the mist cleared, looking down at the floor to try to keep my balance and still the sense that my head was spinning.

I could feel eyes upon me, and I knew this was my chance to leave them with an impression of ferocity and danger.  So I raised my head with the most feral, fang-baring grin I could muster.

I was in the same dim, concrete-walled underground chamber where I had glimpsed the Tesseract previously, kneeling on some sort of raised metal platform across an empty space from the strange wired apparatus that held the Tesseract.  And among the mortals staring back at me, grim-faced or open-mouthed with shock, were the black-clad one-eyed man and the pale scientist that I had seen before.

I stood slowly, holding the scepter out before me, waiting for some sort of advance from the mortals.  Some of them, in black clothing bulkier than the one-eyed man’s (a queer sort of Midgardian armor, it turned out), were holding enormous black firearms, all aimed at me.  “Sir, please put down the spear,” the one-eyed man said with a tone of firm authority.

I glanced down at the scepter consideringly; I supposed that was my cue.  I prodded at the Mind Stone with my magic, and a blast of energy shot from the end of the scepter, striking a bank of electronic equipment that exploded in a white flash and a shower of sparks.  The men with the guns began firing at me.  Some of the bullets glanced harmlessly off my breastplate and pauldron; one lodged somewhat painfully under the skin to the right of my stomach, another in my left upper arm, and I told myself I would deal with them and repair the rips in my clothing once I had found a secure base of operations.  I threw myself at the mortal gunmen, firing more blasts of energy from the scepter.  When more gunshots came from behind me—including one bullet that struck the meat of my left shoulder, which fucking _hurt—_ I pulled some of my throwing knives from their pocket dimension (no inquiring tug from Thanos, praise the Norns!) and flung them at the mortals’ unprotected throats.

At last the gunfire stopped, and I took a few steps back, still holding the scepter out warningly.  The only sounds in the room, amplified by echoes from the cavernous concrete ceiling, were the crackling and sputtering of broken electric devices and the gasps and groans of frightened and injured mortals.  I glanced about for any stirrings of a renewed attack, and out of the corner of my eye spotted a short but well-muscled man hauling himself upright on a railing as he reached for the gun at his hip. In a few quick strides I had reached him and grasped his wrist to still it.  He looked up at me with some trepidation in his eyes, but more defiance and resolve.

I considered him briefly, then swiftly decided that such a quick-thinking, resilient, courageous warrior would be an excellent asset to me—and so much the better that he was close enough to the inner circles of whatever agency held the Tesseract to be in this vault along with the men who controlled its power.  “You have heart,” I told him, by way of explanation (or perhaps apology?), and pressed the tip of the scepter against his… heart, of course.  Jormungandr fuck me, but I had just accidentally made a pun; and I had seen enough silly Midgardian films in the couple of visits I had made during the twentieth century (the technology was crude, of course, but both the heights and depths of what they did with it artistically still managed to impress me) to know that making absurd puns about the dastardly deeds currently being performed was typical sneering-villain behavior.  Well, I thought resignedly, I might as well live up to the role.

Those thoughts, however, were quickly overwhelmed by the tide of information that flooded me from my new Midgardian thrall—Clint Barton, I learned, was his name—as the Mind Stone’s power pulsed from his heart through his whole body.  He was an agent, half-soldier and half-spy, for an organization called S.H.I.E.L.D.—the organization that had found the Tesseract, and was now studying it to see how its power might be exploited.  (It took a moment to find what “S.H.I.E.L.D.” stood for: Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division, in case you care to know.  Barton seemed not to care much, either, which was why he did not keep the information in active memory, and once I found out I quickly ceased to care as well.)  He was at a high level within the organization, as I had hoped, and he seemed (from the eddies of names and locations and connections and codes swirling around in his mind, which I allowed to flow undistinguished around my consciousness) to be privy to much information that would be useful to me, now that I had all but assured that S.H.I.E.L.D. would be my chief source of opposition.

There was a separate stream of information coming from Barton’s mind that seemed almost unconnected to his identity as a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent and his knowledge of its operations: he had a wife and children hidden away on a little farm in the countryside, whose exact location he kept shielded even from his conscious mind.  This was, no doubt, a strategy to prevent himself from divulging the information under torture; a wise strategy, I noted approvingly, and well carried out, given the limitations of a mortal’s mind.  I could no doubt uncover it with a little more probing from the Mind Stone, but it hardly mattered to me.  If I could secure Barton’s loyalty with a touch of my scepter, what need had I to hold his family’s safety over his head?  Let them live and prosper, and later enjoy the rewards of their patriarch’s good service to his king.

I took in all this knowledge about Barton within the space of a second, as the light blue-green of his eyes was overtaken by the bright crystalline blue that showed the Mind Stone’s sway.  Abruptly both fear and defiance left his gaze, and only the resolve was left, but it had a new object entirely.  Barton sheathed his weapon again at his hip and I turned away from him, satisfied in his unbreakable loyalty.  Immediately I turned toward another of the soldier-spies of S.H.I.E.L.D. and forged a similar bond of loyalty.  His name came to me first—Agent Mark Hines—and then details of his life and clandestine work began to surge toward my mind, but I pushed them down, out of my consciousness, to avoid becoming overwhelmed.  I would sort through them after I had secured the Tesseract and reached a safe location.

As soon as I turned my attention back toward the Tesseract, I realized that, while I had been occupied with my new soldiers, the one-eyed man had taken the cube from its harnessing apparatus and placed it in a metal case whose wiring I recognized from my previous reconnaissance visit.  Director Fury, Nick Fury; the name and title drifted up from the store of knowledge I had imbibed from Barton but allowed to remain below the level of awareness until needed.  “Please don’t,” I told him quietly; at this point, I suspected, overt threats would be superfluous.  “I still need that.”

“This doesn’t have to get any messier,” he said.  His voice was calm, but could not cover the desperation of his attempt to salvage an unsalvageable situation.

“Of course it does.  I’ve come too far for anything else,” I snapped; and by that I did not mean only the physical distance I had traveled from Sanctuary, or even from Asgard.

This was the time to announce myself and my errand, I supposed; perhaps then they would understand how hopeless their position really was.  “I am Loki,” I began.  A moment’s pause: Loki what?  The name alone sounded naked, lonely, absurd.  Not _Loki Odinson,_ surely; but I was damned if I would call myself _Loki Laufeyson._   “Of Asgard” was what I quickly decided on: I had, after all, been shaped by my upbringing and education there.  “And I am burdened with glorious purpose,” I added in a weighty tone, regaining my stride after the brief hesitation.

“Loki!” came the accented voice of the pale scientist, in a tone of recognition.  I turned toward him in surprise.  “Brother of Thor!” he elaborated.  _Of course._ I failed to suppress a glare and a reflexive clench of my jaw at those words.  It was not so long ago that I had thought of myself as hardly more than Thor’s brother, Thor’s helper, Thor’s shadow.  Why should anyone—even this Midgardian mortal, who no doubt thought himself greatly distinguished by having known Thor for a few days—think of me as anything else?

Nick Fury must have known of Thor and Asgard, because he seized on this new information to continue his desperate effort at damage control.  “We have no quarrel with your people,” he said.  His placating tone sounded, insultingly, like the one that might be used to calm a snarling dog.  _And why shouldn’t it?  I may no longer be Thor’s dog, but now I am Thanos’s.  And if I am a mad dog, what does that make him…?_

“An ant has no quarrel with a boot,” I replied, almost pityingly.

“Are you planning to step on us?” Fury asked me, his tone contemptuous.

I was straying _off message,_ as Ermann would have put it, in the curious jargon of advertising.  “I come with glad tidings,” I said brightly, righting my course.  “Of a world made free.”

“Free from what?” Fury asked, predictably, his voice dripping with resigned skepticism.

“Freedom,” I answered swiftly, silently thanking Gamora for the delightful paradox she had provided me: _There is a kind of freedom in the lack of freedom._ “Freedom is life’s great lie,” I continued.  Such lines were well-rehearsed: this was my _campaign platform,_ as Ermann had put it sometimes, or sometimes, my _sales pitch._ In a flash of villainous inspiration, I made another pun, this one deliberate: “Once you accept that, in your heart”—I turned to face the scientist (whose name, I learned through the Mind Stone, was Erik Selvig) and pressed the blade of the scepter to his heart—“you will know peace.”

“Yeah, you say peace,” Fury drawled.  “I kind of think you mean the other thing.”

“Sir, Director Fury is stalling,” Barton said abruptly.  I turned to him, surprised and pleased with my new servant’s insight as well as his instant shift of loyalty.  “This place is about to blow and drop a hundred feet of rock on us.  He means to bury us.”

“Like the pharaohs of old,” Fury confirmed.  The word sounded familiar, but I did not fully grasp his meaning until an image passed from Barton’s store of knowledge into mine: great stone pyramids in the desert, a monument and a tomb for god-kings embalmed and buried thousands of years ago in stone passages deep beneath them.

“He’s right,” Selvig chimed in, after a glance at the screen of one of his electronic devices.  “The portal is collapsing in on itself.  You’ve got maybe two minutes before this goes critical.”

I had only a glimpse of Selvig’s sense of what it means for something to _go critical_ (to pass a point at which a process can no longer be slowed or reversed, in case you were wondering), but I did recall Thanos’s warning that the portal between the Mind Stone and the Space Stone was temporary and unstable.  “Well, then,” I said, businesslike, with a glance at Barton.  He drew his weapon and shot Fury in the chest; Fury collapsed to the ground.  Barton grasped the handle of the case in which the Tesseract was contained and handed it to Selvig, who hugged it to his chest as if it were an infant in his care.  (I do understand the impulse; I have behaved much the same with rare texts or magical artifacts I was studying.)  Without an order spoken, as if of one mind—which I suppose, in a way, we were—my servants and I proceeded toward the door.

As soon as I began walking, the pain and exhaustion that had been kept at bay by the danger and urgency of the situation hit me again—a dart through my spine, a spasm of the muscles in my back, a resurgent wave of dizziness and nausea—and I doubled over, lost my balance, and stumbled.  For a moment I dreaded for my new followers to see this sign of weakness.  But within an instant, Agent Hines had placed a steadying hand on the small of my back and helped me to stand straight again: a reminder that the loyalty produced by the Mind Stone was unconditional. If I showed weakness, their only response would be to support and protect me—as even Ermann had tried to do, despite his meager resources.  I fought down the bitterness and anger that such thoughts threatened to reawaken in me, and continued on without stumbling again.

Barton led us to another concrete-walled room, low-ceilinged this time, full of automotive vehicles.  (They run by burning energy-dense chemicals compressed from the bodies of long-dead things.  Clever in the short term; disastrous if done for too long, which, alas, the Midgardians have.)  “We need these vehicles,” he announced authoritatively to a dark-haired young woman who was also dressed all in black (I was sensing a theme).  Hines had commandeered one of them and was beginning to drive off even as the woman puzzled over what we were doing.  Selvig climbed into the nearest one with the Tesseract still cradled in his arms; I crouched on the open bed in the back, clutching the scepter and concentrating again on not vomiting.

“Who’s that?” the young woman asked Barton, clearly meaning me.  “He didn’t tell me,” Barton said shortly.  The lie was surely easier to explain than the truth.

She had turned away, still looking puzzled but undisturbed, when a voice crackled from a black communication device at her hip: Fury’s, no doubt warning her of our sinister aims.  Barton shot at her, but she ducked and rolled just in time, and began shooting back at us—uselessly, the bullets glancing off the armored exterior of the vehicle—as Barton drove away, into a tunnel that led up toward Midgard’s surface.

From my perch in the back of the vehicle, I held tight to the railing (it was not the most stable or comfortable seat, which did nothing for my nausea) and watched for pursuers.  It was not long before someone began shooting at us from a small silver vehicle with flashing lights—the head of a cavalcade of similar vehicles.  Willing my hand steady, I took aim with the scepter, nudged it with my seiðr, and fired a blast that flipped the attacker into the path of its fellows, hindering further pursuit.

But somehow the woman had caught up to us: she drove into the tunnel from a passageway ahead of us and rammed into us head-on, fighting the momentum of our vehicle with hers.  She and Barton shot at each other, pointlessly it seemed, until he at last forced her aside and sped past her toward the tunnel’s mouth.  Behind us the whole compound was collapsing, as Barton and Selvig had promised; already chunks of stone and concrete, threaded through with the metal beams and pipes that had served as bone and artery to this secret underground city, were crashing down beside our pursuer’s vehicle.  She was close enough that I could see the frustration and terror in her eyes as she swerved to dodge them, but it was not worth the energy it would have taken to turn the force of the Mind Stone upon her.  The ground above soon did my work for me: great slabs of concrete fell to block her path, if not to crush her, while we sped unimpeded toward the great steel doors that parted to let us through.

We were not yet clear of all the obstacles, however: a roaring noise announced the presence of a winged conveyance propelled by spinning blades atop it (Barton’s knowledge provided me with the word _helicopter),_ which quickly overtook us and turned to face us.  Barton quickly turned from the road to evade it, hurtling over a dusty field studded with clumps of dry grass, but the helicopter, faster and more agile, swung around to confront us again.  A door in the side open and Fury—alive, somehow—shot at us from above with nothing more powerful than a handheld pistol.  It was almost unfair, I reflected without regret as I fired a blast of energy from the scepter at the blades of the helicopter, and it crashed to the ground in flames.  Impressively, Fury flung himself clear and continued to shoot at us with the handgun as we regained the road and drove away—a gesture of defiance, I think, more than an earnest attempt to stop us.

“How was he still alive?” I called to Barton, somewhat irritably, after I had recovered my breath and my balance.  “You shot him in the chest.”

“Must’ve been wearing body armor,” Barton replied, still the laconic soldier.

“I saw no armor,” I pointed out; what I had in mind, of course, was metal plate armor of the kind we— the kind Asgardians wear.

“Bulletproof vest under his clothes,” Barton explained.

“Next time, then, perhaps you should try shooting for the head,” I suggested amiably.

“Next time,” Barton agreed.

He drove without speaking for a couple minutes before he asked, “You comfy back there, sir?  There’s another seat behind us in the cab if you’d prefer.”

“Comfortable enough,” I said coolly.  “I thought I should keep watch at the rear, in case anyone else follows us.”

“I kinda doubt it at this point,” he replied.  “But best to be sure, I guess.”

Unexpectedly, then, he pulled to the side of the road.  “What are you doing?” Selvig asked, just as I barked out, “I said I was fine.”

“Of course, sir, but that’s not why I stopped,” Barton said, turning to address my remark immediately while ignoring Selvig’s.  “Can you drive?” he asked the scientist.

He could drive an automobile, I knew from my glimpse inside his mind, but he preferred the _bicycle:_ a thin-framed two-wheeled vehicle whose mechanism amplified the motive power of the rider’s own feet.  (This, I also gathered, was typical of people, like him, from the northern reaches of Europe: how far they have strayed from their dragon-headed longboats!)  Sure enough, Selvig replied testily, “Of course I _can_ drive, but I’m much happier biking everywhere.”

“Yeah, well, a bike can’t transport three people and an infinite power source,” Barton said.

“You might be surprised,” Selvig retorted.  “Why do you want me to drive anyway?”

“I need to send some messages, and you know it’s not safe to text and drive.”  This seemed to be some sort of joke, because he delivered it with a little smirk in his voice, but I could not immediately grasp the humor from the information I had so far gleaned from him and sifted through.

“What messages?” I asked sharply.

“Recruiting,” Barton answered simply.  Of course: I needed more than three advance troops to prepare my invasion.

“I don’t even know where we’re going,” Selvig complained.

Barton did not reply immediately, but pressed some buttons on the console at the front of the vehicle.  “There,” he said when he was finished.  “The car knows where we’re going.  Just follow the directions and don’t crash, and we’ll be fine.”

Selvig carefully stowed the case with the Tesseract in the rear seat of the _cab_ before he walked around the front of the vehicle to take the driver’s seat.  Before he slid into the passenger seat, Barton turned around and asked me, “You sure you’re OK back there?”

Ermann again, only far more useful.  The thought was raising a queer lump in my throat—bitterness again, yes, but also what felt suspiciously like _sentimentality._ I chalked it up to my exhaustion and turned my mind elsewhere.  “Where is it you’re taking us, Barton?”

“Former S.H.I.E.L.D. base.  It’s deserted now, but still has a lot of snazzy equipment—out of date by current S.H.I.E.L.D. standards, but more than good enough, since we’ve got the professor here.”  He nodded toward Selvig.

 _Snazzy—_ curious word, isn’t it?  It does not really have an equivalent in Asgardian, but I like its ring of connotations, and I am often tempted to borrow it.  I would encourage you to start a fashion, but I’m afraid someone would ask where you learned it.

We drove through the night on deserted roads, smoothed but unpaved with the black stone that Midgardians use for their commonly traveled thoroughfares.  I caught only glimpses of lights in the distance that told of other vehicles or places of habitation.  Gradually, what little I could see of the landscape around us changed from desert or half-desert, with sand and dust interrupted only by dry scrubby vegetation and the occasional short, knotted tree, to greener plains to ever-so-gently rolling hills.  The hills were rising higher, and the first gray light of dawn was beginning to reveal the tree-covered slopes of what might even be by courtesy called mountains, when a well-concealed door in the rocky side of one of the steeper hills opened to disclose a tunnel leading down beneath it.

At last Selvig stopped the vehicle in a low-ceilinged concrete chamber very much like the one we had departed from (a _parking garage,_ both of their minds informed me), and he and Barton both got out.  I eased my cramped fingers from their grip on the railing and climbed down from the bed of the vehicle, ignoring both Barton’s hand, outstretched to offer assistance, and the jolt of pain that shot up my spine.

“How has your _recruiting_ progressed, Agent Barton?” I asked.

“It’s been very productive, sir,” he answered, allowing himself a small self-satisfied smile.

“It seems we have been preceded by some of your recruits,” I observed; there were already a few vehicles in the garage—mostly black and bulky like the one we had driven, but a few smaller, in red or silver or white—despite Barton’s assurance that the base was deserted.

“Yeah, some of them were coming from closer,” Barton confirmed.  “Good thing, too; means we can get started sooner.  Come on, I’ll show you where the old lab is,” he said to Selvig.

The scientist gathered the Tesseract from the back seat as gingerly as he had placed it there, and followed Barton through dim concrete hallways to a room curtained off by strips of clear plastic (another fascinating use for the compressed remains of long-dead creatures), full of electronic equipment apparently similar to what I had seen in the vault where the Tesseract had been kept.  Selvig looked around, gave a long-suffering sigh, and said dubiously, “I suppose it will have to do.  But I don’t know how long it will take to rig a new harness all by myself…”

“Then it’s a good thing you won’t have to,” Barton told him.  As if on cue, two people, a middle-aged woman with sleek dark hair and a bristle-haired young man, approached from the hallway.  They had been talking animatedly with each other, but seeing us in the laboratory, they lowered their voices as they came near and had fallen silent by the time they entered through the segmented plastic curtain.  Barton recognized them instantly, though they did not seem to know him.

“Dr. Elescu, Dr. Minkowski,” he said, nodding to each of them.  “I’m Clint Barton, the one who contacted you.”  They murmured polite greetings.  “This is Loki,” he said, gesturing deferentially to me.  “He’s the boss here, really.  But he’s a very busy man, so you’ll mostly be getting directions through me.”  Looking confused and slightly uncomfortable—clearly bemused at my unusual vesture, and alarmed by the cruel-bladed scepter I still held—Drs. Elescu and Minkowski gave me small awkward bows, and I nodded graciously to them in return.

“You’ll be working with Dr. Selvig here,” Barton continued.  Here the new scientists clearly felt they were on firmer ground; they stepped forward and shook hands warmly with Selvig.  “Call me Erik, please,” he invited them, and they introduced themselves, respectively, as Claudia and Greg.  “I’m such an admirer of your work, Dr. Selvig—I mean, Erik,” the young man said earnestly.

“You’ve never told me I can call you Erik,” Barton huffed, feigning offense.

“No, I haven’t,” Selvig acknowledged cheerfully, while Claudia and Greg laughed.

“Well, we’ll leave you to it,” Barton told them with a tight smile, and ushered me into the main hallway.  “I’m not sure why he doesn’t like me,” he confided with a small shake of his head.

“You unnerve him,” I said, without really thinking about it; the knowledge had simply bubbled up from what I had gathered from Selvig when I brought him under my sway.

Barton turned toward me abruptly, clearly startled by my frank answer.  “Unnerve him?  Why?”

And now I had to explain.  “He finds you… machine-like in your devotion to duty, your stoic efficiency… even the way you watch from above.  Like a human surveillance camera.”  I was finding out what a _surveillance camera_ was even as I uttered the words.  “And as far as he knows, you don’t have a life outside your service to S.H.I.E.L.D.”

Barton stopped walking.  “You know,” he said uncertainly.

“Yes, I know,” I said, a quiet reassurance.  “And never fear: your family will be well provided for when I come into my kingdom.”

“Thank you, sir,” he said, with sincere gratitude and relief.  We continued walking down the concrete hallway.  Dark water stains on the walls indicated that the building was in some disrepair after its years of disuse.  Barton stopped to talk to some more people; he introduced me again, respectfully, as his superior, but then issued some instructions I did not fully understand while I allowed my attention to wander around the bleak space.  It was as if I could feel the weight of the earth above me, pressing the air from my lungs.  It reminded me of my cell on Sanctuary.  I shuddered and drew in a sharp, gasping breath, which had suddenly become difficult.

Barton noticed.  He cut short the conversation he was having and drew me away.  I shook my head, trying to dispel the sudden claustrophobia.  “I’ll need to know whatever you can tell me about who, or what, S.H.I.E.L.D. will send to oppose me,” I told Barton, trying for a tone of command.

“Of course, sir,” he said, a little too gently.  What, did he think I was fragile now?  “Respectfully, though, I think I need to brief our recruits first on what they need to do to get the base up and running again.  That’ll take a few hours.”

“As you see fit,” I said shortly.  “Is there anything I might do to assist with that?” I asked, feeling utterly absurd.  In this he was the opposite of Ermann: so competent and efficient that now _I_ felt superfluous in my own errand.

Barton sensed that, too.  He looked squarely into my eyes, so that I could not ignore the bright, unnatural blue that engulfed his and instantly obviated all the respect and concern that radiated from them.  “Permission to speak freely,” he ventured.

“Granted,” I said, impatient.

“Completely freely?”

I didn’t think I liked where this was going.  “Yes, of course.”

He cleared his throat.  “To be perfectly frank, sir, you look like shit.”

Oh, not this again.  “You might consider not speaking so _completely_ freely, Agent Barton.”

“Meaning no disrespect, sir.”

I allowed myself a subtle eye-roll.  “What _did_ you mean, then?”

“I meant that maybe the best thing you could do for the next few hours, while I’m getting everything shipshape here, is get some sleep.”

The idea of several hours of rest, without the threat of intrusion by Thanos, sounded so attractive that I let out a little sigh of longing before I could stop myself.  But no; I mustn’t yield to temptation.  “My time is limited,” I pointed out.  “I cannot afford to lose any of it.”

“I wouldn’t consider it lost time,” Barton reasoned.  “You’ll function better when you’re not completely exhausted, so you’ll make better use of the time you have.”

I was all too willing to be persuaded.  “You have everything in hand in the meantime?” I asked, trying not to sound fretful.

“Absolutely,” he assured me.  “And I’ll send someone out to lay in some supplies.  You look like you could use a solid meal, and maybe a shower.  But sleep first.”

I nodded, not entirely trusting myself to speak.  _It is only a counterfeit of care,_ I reminded myself sternly as I followed him down a side corridor.

Barton opened a heavy metal door to a small room with four spare military cots, one in each corner.  One of them was still rumpled; its last occupant had not bothered to tidy it before the base was abandoned.

“It’s for agents to take a nap when they’re not needed at that very moment, but need to be on hand in case something happens.  Like they have in hospitals, for doctors working long shifts.”

“I see.”  I went to the cot in the far corner, with a view of the door.  The mattress was thin and lumpy, the blanket scratchy, the sheets stiff as paper; but to one who had spent the past three months sleeping on a stone floor, it could have been the most sumptuous feather bed in the royal palace of Asgard.

“How long has it been since I arrived?” I suddenly thought to ask.  I could not risk sleeping through my appointed conference with the Other, but I feared that once I closed my eyes, I could sleep almost indefinitely.

Barton consulted the luminous screen of a small black device he carried with him everywhere.  “A little over ten hours.”

I had all of fourteen hours.  “Please wake me in… six hours’ time.”  It was not much, but I estimated that it was longer than I had slept without interruption for as long as Thanos had had unfettered access to my mind.

Barton looked dissatisfied.  “You’re sure that’ll be enough?”

“It will have to be.”

“Six hours it is, then.”  Barton turned to leave and started to pull the door closed behind him, but then paused and turned back toward me.  “Do you need anything else?” he asked.  Through the brisk efficiency of the soldier, something else was showing through: the father, I surmised.

As if in answer to that thought, I suddenly felt very thirsty: a child asking for a glass of water before his father put him to bed.  _Did Odin ever tuck me in at night?_ I reached for the memory, but it was as if my fingers closed on empty air.  “Some water would not go amiss,” I said, trying for as much dignity as possible under the circumstances.

“You got it, boss,” Barton said.  It sounded very much like something he would say to his young son.  It occurred to me that, despite my haggard appearance, I still must have looked to him as if I was the younger of us.

He returned not with a glass of water, but with a clear plastic bottle, capped with blue plastic.  I tried tugging at the cap, but it did not open.  I stared down at it, feeling as foolish as when I had first encountered a zipper.

“Here,” Barton said.  He took the bottle from me and opened it by twisting the cap, then put the cap back on by twisting it in the other direction and handed it back to me.

I imitated his motion to open the bottle again, and noted the spiral grooves in the neck of the bottle.  “Huh,” I said.

“I guess they don’t have these in Asgard,” he said wryly.

“No,” I confirmed, then took a drink from the bottle.  The water tasted faintly of the plastic it was contained in, but I was thirsty enough not to care.

“Well, they don’t have magic bridges to other galaxies here, so we’re all learning new things,” Barton said.

“Indeed.”

“’Night, boss.  Light switch is here.”  He demonstrated by flipping the small toggle beside the door up, which turned off the wan electric light that hung from the ceiling, and then down again, which turned it back on.  Then he backed the rest of the way out and closed the door.

I walked across the small room to turn off the light and felt my way back through the dark, moving as if through molasses.  I allowed the strangeness of my situation to sink in.  _I have come to Midgard to conquer and rule it, and secure the Space Stone for Thanos the Mad Titan.  I have enslaved this mortal to my will, and he is showing me the care he might show to his child.  I can’t remember whether my father—the man who called himself my father—ever tucked me in at night._

I was too exhausted to let it bother me for long.  I was, as they say, asleep before my head hit the pillow.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, I left in the thing about the word "snazzy" even though I wrote it when I was loopy late at night and it's kind of self-indulgent. I'll take it out if people think it's too silly.


	13. Plans

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loki learns about the Avengers Initiative, has a meeting with the Other, and starts formulating a plan (and we find out why his hair looked so terrible in _The Avengers_ ).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> How did this chapter get so fucking long? Too much detail, that's how. It's been so damned long since the last update that I didn't want to take more time cutting it down, so... if I'd had more time I would have written you a shorter chapter. Please let me know if anything jumps out as being unnecessary. And we still haven't gotten to Stuttgart yet. Next chapter, definitely!
> 
> A note on the deleted/extended version of the conversation with Barton: I moved some of that deleted dialogue earlier in the chapter because it didn't make sense to me that by the point Loki reported in to the Other, he and Clint still hadn't talked about the opposition he was going to face from the Avengers. So I just decided they did talk about it earlier, and moved the relevant canon dialogue there.

When I slept, I dreamed.  It seemed that those days I could not sleep for any length of time without being beset by anxious, unsettling dreams that left me feeling scarcely more rested when I awoke than when I had gone to sleep.

This dream began with the feeling of eyes upon me.  Whose eyes, I was not sure: Thanos’s, perhaps, glittering and cruel; perhaps Heimdall’s impassive golden gaze; the piercing steel-blue stare of Odin’s eye from the high seat of Hliðskjalf; or maybe it was the starless abyss in the eyes of Death herself that I felt watching me.

When I became aware of more than that, I was walking the golden halls of Asgard’s palace.  They were deserted, and I knew with the certainty one only has in dreams that everyone was dead.  I looked out between the golden columns and saw neither the mountains that rise up behind the city nor the sea that stretches out before it, but the lifeless black surface of Sanctuary, scarred with craters and overshadowed by great twisting spires of stone.  I came to the massive doors of the throne room and stopped, suddenly paralyzed with fear.  I did not know whom I would find upon the throne if I entered—Odin, or his corpse? Thanos? his Lady Death?—but I was terrified to face any of them.

Unexpectedly—for I had thought everyone was dead?—I saw Thor striding toward me, in full gleaming armor with his blood-red cloak flowing from his shoulders and Mjölnir at the ready.  Fury sparked like lightning in his eyes.  “Loki, what have you done?” he growled as he approached me.

I wanted to answer, but my jaws seemed to be sealed shut; I wanted to flee, but my feet seemed rooted to the ground.  Thor kept coming, incandescent with his righteous anger.  “Look what you have brought down upon us!” he shouted, and gestured behind him.

There had been nothing there—the halls had been empty—but now they were lined with the dead.  On one side of the hallway, all the people—soldiers, nobles, servants, townspeople; men, women, and children alike—were frozen under a sheet of ice, their skin tinged blue, their eyes open in terror.  On the other side, the bodies were charred beyond recognition, the metal of their armor and even their bones melted into strange twisted shapes, a grotesque echo of the spires of stone outside.

 _I did not do this, it was not me,_ I wanted to protest, but with a sudden stab of guilt I knew that I would be lying.  “You have brought Ragnarök upon us, you have brought the end of all the worlds, as it was foretold,” Thor continued, half a reproach and half a lament.

I stood frozen in horror as Thor came ever closer.  I expected him to raise Mjölnir and crush my skull with it, but instead he dropped the hammer and gripped my shoulder with his right hand, while with his left he drew a hidden dagger and plunged it into my side.  “Look what you have done,” he growled, his fingers digging into my shoulder until their grip was as sharp and painful as the knife…

Whether it was the pain that woke me, or the sound of Barton’s knock, or the light from the hallway as he opened the door, I am not sure. “It’s been six hours, boss,” he said quietly, even gently.  I felt myself being fathered again, and for some reason it irritated me.  Perhaps it was because of the pain I had newly become aware of again: during the brief confrontation in S.H.I.E.L.D.’s vault, bullets had lodged in my shoulder, my arm, and my side—not deeply, of course, but enough under the skin to be annoying and painful.  I had stopped feeling them amid the danger and anxiety of the previous night, but as I slept they had edged back into my consciousness.

“Thank you, Barton,” I said shortly.  “Is there a healing room—an infirmary somewhere?”  I wanted to extract the bullets carefully and clean the wounds before I sealed them with seiðr.

“Of course, and I’ll show you to it,” he replied, solicitous as ever.  “Are you hurt?  There’s a medic who can get you patched up.”

“No,” I said sharply—more sharply than I had intended; Barton seemed startled by my vehemence.  As much as Midgardian medicine has improved in the last century, I did not trust some strange human bungler to know how to deal with Aesir flesh and blood.  “No, I’d rather handle it myself,” I added more temperately.

“As you wish,” he said, though concern still lingered in his eerily blue eyes.  “Come with me.”

I picked up the scepter from where I had laid it underneath my cot—I felt as if I could not bear to be away from it, though I could not discern why; no doubt it was the insidious hold that Thanos or his servant still had on me—and followed Barton once more through the maze-like corridors of the underground base.  Eventually he showed me into a room with a narrow bed in the center, its walls lined with gleaming metal counters with tall cabinets both above and below them.

“What supplies do you need?” he asked.  “Bandages?  Needle and thread?”

“Not necessary,” I said briskly.  “But I do need… a tool that can remove bullets.  A tonged instrument of some kind.  And clean cloths to wash out the wounds.”

“You were shot?”  His eyes had widened and the concern in them intensified to horror.  “Why didn’t you tell me before?  Sir,” he added hurriedly.  He seemed prone to forget that I was his master, not his wayward child.

“You may recall that I am not human,” I pointed out somewhat coldly.  “Bullets cannot penetrate deeply into my flesh.  But I would still prefer not to have them there at all.”

“Of course, sir,” he said, almost sheepish, then began rummaging around in cabinets until he found what I had requested: a large pair of gripping tongs _(forceps,_ his mind called the tool) and a few lengths of white gauze.  After a bit more rummaging, he also produced two small bottles of clear liquid: one of saltwater that could be used to flush the wounds, and another of alcohol to sterilize them.

For a moment I waited for him to leave, but he remained standing beside the counter where he had set the medical supplies, with a stubborn look on his face; he must have felt my mental nudges encouraging him to go, but he was resisting them.  I felt strangely self-conscious about removing my clothing in front of him, though I knew I should not; regardless of what he saw, his loyalty would not waver.

I sighed.  “If you’re going to stay, you might as well make yourself useful,” I said tightly.  “Tell me: how go your preparations?”

While I stripped off overcoat, tunic, and shirt, Barton rattled off the number of skilled mercenaries, scientists, technicians, and miscellaneous assistants he had recruited, as well as the number and type of Midgardian weapons he had amassed.  But when my torso was fully bared, he hissed in dismay and sympathy.  At what, I was not entirely sure: at the barely closed bullet wounds still crusted with dried blood, or the shiny pink flogging scars that crisscrossed my back, or my sunken stomach and prominent ribs, or perhaps all three.

I pressed my lips into a firm line, reached for the gauze he had found, wetted it with water from the tap above a sink at the end of the counter, and began cleaning the dried blood from the wound in my side while I snapped, “Continue.”

He gave his head a slight shake and went on to report that Selvig and his colleagues were making good progress in building a device to harness the power of the Tesseract; the only problem was that they had not yet thought of a way to stabilize it enough to open a portal for any significant amount of time.  I listened while I staunched the renewed bleeding from the wound and then, when it had slowed enough to be manageable, used the forceps to pry the bullet from my flesh and dropped the bloodied, crumpled shard of metal into the sink, to be disposed of later.  Barton trailed off as he watched me, his brow furrowed.

“Is there something that troubles you, Agent Barton?” I asked him pointedly.

“I didn’t mean to stare, sir.  I was only thinking that you must have been trained well as a soldier, to be able to pull bullets from your own body without minding the pain.”

“Yes, I suppose I was,” I replied shortly.  I splashed saltwater into the hole in my side and hastily caught the flow of diluted blood with a fresh piece of gauze.  “Is that all you have to report about your progress?”

“For now.  The rest is just details that are best left to me.  Of course I’ll keep you updated on any progress with the Tesseract.”

“You have been… very thorough.”  I neglected to tell him how useless and incompetent he made me feel, but I did go so far as to remark, “I can see why Fury chose you to guard it.”

“You’re going to have to contend with him, sir,” Barton told me seriously.  “As long as he’s in the air, I can’t pin him down.  And he’ll be putting together a team.”

That caught my attention far more thoroughly than his recitation of figures.  “Are they a threat?”

“To each other more than likely,” Barton answered, a touch snide.  “But if Fury can get them on track—and he might—they could throw some noise our way.”

“You admire Fury,” I observed evenly.

“He’s got a clear line of sight,” Barton said, noncommittal.  Very much an archer’s metaphor, I noted.

“Is that why you failed to kill him?”  My voice was harsh through my gritted teeth as I pressed alcohol-soaked gauze against my side; it burned like Hel.

Barton paused.  “It might be,” he admitted.  He seemed worried and apologetic.  “I was disoriented,” he offered.  “And I’m not at my best with a gun.”

I might have expected that he would not instantly lose all traces of his former loyalties and affections.  I had to be careful with how I used him, then, and whom I let him encounter.

“I want to know everything you can tell me about this team of his,” I ordered him sharply, then explained in a more measured tone: “I would… test their mettle.”

Barton opened his mouth to start talking, then stopped short and gaped when I set careful fingers to my wound and, with a surge of magic that glowed brightly green for just a moment, coaxed the edges to fuse back together.  I looked up at him, eyebrows raised.  “You’ve seen a hole open in space and a god walk through,” I reminded him.  “Surely a bit of healing magic is nothing to swoon over.”

“No swooning here,” he assured me with a wry grin.  “But just because I’ve seen something weirder doesn’t mean I can’t still be impressed by something I’ve never seen before.”

“Fair enough,” I said with a thin-lipped smile.  “But about Fury’s team…?”

“Right.  They’re not agents like me or the ones you met at the other base.  If I know Fury—and I’d say I know him better than most—he plans to send a very… specialized force, of very unusual people.  Four of them, supported by the very best of his agents.”

I had now turned my attention to the bullet wound in my left arm; I didn’t look up from clearing away the clotted blood to ask, “Unusual how?”

“Well… they’re all unusual in different ways, and that’s part of why Fury wanted to put them together—they’d bring different abilities, different strengths—but of course that’s a double-edged sword.  The Avengers Initiative, he was calling it.  Designed to deal with… unusual threats.  As unusual as the Avengers themselves.  As a small force, they’d be flexible and innovative, but still very powerful.”

While he spoke, I had succeeded in reopening the wound and stemming the sluggish bleeding, and when he stopped speaking I was somewhat awkwardly trying to angle the forceps to get at the bullet.

“Do you need help with that, sir?” Barton offered.  He was hesitant, recalling my previous irritation at his expressions of concern.

I considered it, and realized that I would definitely need his help to get the last bullet that had lodged high in my back, in the flesh between my neck and my left shoulder.  “Very well,” I sighed, then presented him with the forceps and turned my left side toward him.

“I think it would be easier if you sat down,” he said, gesturing toward the bed in the center of the room.  I complied reluctantly, and felt as well as heard the crinkling of the thin sheet of white paper that covered it.  I felt more than ever like a child, having come to Eir’s healing room, with trepidation and not a little shame, for diagnosis and treatment of one of my all-too-frequent illnesses.

“You’re right, it isn’t deep,” Barton remarked before he carefully plucked the bullet from its hole—more carefully, and less painfully, than I had done with the previous one—and dropped it into the sink beside its mate.

“Are you going to elaborate on what makes these ‘Avengers’ so unusual?” I asked shortly, not meeting his gaze as he gently lifted my arm away from my body to flush the wound with the saltwater.

“Of course,” Barton said, imperturbable as ever.  “I’ll start with the first one to sign on.  She’s a friend of mine, so I’d appreciate it if you didn’t hurt her any more than she makes necessary—and knowing her, she might well make it necessary.  It would be best if we could recruit her, of course.  This is going to sting,” he warned abruptly, gesturing with a cloth that reeked of alcohol (and not even the drinkable kind, more’s the pity).

“No, really?” I drawled, and he laughed, with surprise as much as amusement.  I refused to flinch at the burn of the alcohol; I only said, “Go on.”

“Her name is Natasha Romanoff—well, Natalia Alianova Romanova, to be properly Russian about it, but here in the States Natasha Romanoff does just fine.  And we in the business—the espionage business, that is—know her affectionately as the Black Widow.  Or not so affectionately, depending on which side of her you get on.  I probably know her as well as anyone, but I still don’t know the half of how she does what she does.  She could get world-saving information from a stone, and she could kill you unarmed in a cocktail dress and heels.”

Once again I closed the wound with a burst of magic and discouraged Barton from gawking too long by asking, “And how did this Black Widow acquire her remarkable skills?”

“She was raised from early childhood in a special house with other girls like her—trained to be a spy and an assassin, officially for the Soviet Union—”  He paused.  “Do you know what the Soviet Union is?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I do,” I said, suppressing my irritation; he had been quite right to ask, even though I knew from my twentieth-century visits to Midgard without having to search through Barton’s knowledge.

“Oh!  Good, then.”  Barton wetted another clean piece of gauze at the sink before he walked around the foot of the bed to stand behind me and repeat the procedure with the wound in my shoulder.  “As I was saying… Natasha was officially supposed to be a spy for the Soviets—or in the end for the Russian Federation, because the Soviet Union collapsed not long after she was taken in by the Red Room—but she was actually working for a secret organization called Hydra.  I’ve never been clear on what their goal is; the usual chaos, destruction, world domination shit, I guess.”  

I almost snorted; that could well have been a description of my own goals at the moment.

“She did some terrible things for them before I brought her into S.H.I.E.L.D.  A lot of murders, a lot of collateral damage.  She’d almost never admit it, but she still feels pretty guilty about it.  But she doesn’t know how to do anything else, so now she does it for the other side, and hopes she’s found the side of the angels.”

“Hmm.”  I made a note to myself to ask Barton later for more details of Natasha Romanoff’s past sins; such information might be useful to me, if it was, as he said, a point of vulnerability.  “And the other Avengers?” I asked, determinedly ignoring the throb from the forceps prodding, however gingerly, into the deepest and most painful of my injuries.

“The second one to get in on the Initiative—and when I say ‘get in on,’ I don’t mean it was his idea, because it definitely wasn’t—is a man named Tony Stark.  He’s a billionaire several times over—and that would have been true just with what he inherited from his father, who was a genius inventor.  Weapons, mostly.  But of course Tony Stark is a genius inventor, too, and he continued to build his father’s empire—still mostly in weapons—and made a few more billions.  Then he was attacked and captured by terrorists using the weapons he made; they wanted him to build them more weapons, more destructive than anything short of nuclear ones.  But instead he built a flying suit of armor to get himself out.  Ever since, he’s been building improved versions of it, using it to stop terrorists and the people who arm them.  As a kind of penance, I think, for all the pain he caused in his years as a weapons dealer.”

“What do you mean when you say it wasn’t his idea to join the Avengers Initiative?”

“I mean Fury sprang it on him and he wasn’t thrilled with the idea.  The expression ‘Doesn’t play well with others’ was invented for badly behaved children and Tony Stark.  Fury pulled him from the project after some stunts he pulled a couple years ago.  But I strongly suspect he’ll rethink that decision under present circumstances.”

He had finished cleaning the wound and I reached a hand over my shoulder to seal it.  “Thank you for your assistance,” I said stiffly, then began dressing once more.  I repaired the bullet holes in each article of clothing before I put it on, reminding the weave of the fabric or the grain of the leather of the form it was accustomed to.

“We laid in some edible supplies as well,” he told me.  “Though to be honest I’m not sure what Asgardians eat.”

“The same things Midgardians eat,” I assured him, “only in greater quantities.”

He laughed.  “Well, it’s a good thing I sent out a lot of agents to buy food.  Come on, I’ve already got some people cooking in the mess.”

I followed him again, down different featureless concrete hallways—how he knew his way around this place was a mystery to me—teeming with black-clad mercenaries.  The mercenaries regarded with suspicion the scientists who passed them, some in white coats, some only in casual clothing.  The kitchen was attached to a smallish dining hall in which a few small clusters of people were eating.

Barton stuck his head into the kitchen area and announced, “The boss is hungry.  What have you got?”

“Eggs,” said a cheerful young man in a stained white smock.  “Lots of eggs.  Easy to scramble in industrial quantities, and you can throw all kinds of good shit in with ’em.  Ham, cheese, tomatoes, peppers—good way to get your agents to eat their vegetables.”

“Sound good?” Barton asked, turning to me.

“Sounds magnificent,” I told him truthfully.  My mouth was watering at the smells of simple, wholesome food, which seemed familiar only from distant memory.

Barton loaded up two plates—one more copiously than the other—from a metal bin of egg-based mess and filled two mugs with coffee from one of several glass pots on heating plates.  “You drink coffee?” he asked me over his shoulder.

“I have been known to, yes.”  I had been encountering it, in various forms, on visits to Midgard since the eighteenth century.

“Great,” he said.  He picked up his plate and mug and nodded to me to do the same.  We sat in a corner of the mess hall away from the other groups of people eating so that he could continue imparting sensitive S.H.I.E.L.D. information in relative privacy.

“The third member of the Avengers Initiative is… well, have you heard of Captain America?” Barton asked around a mouthful of food.

I was already bringing my fork up to my mouth before I realized that this was the first real food I had eaten—food that was not tasteless blocks of protein intended to satisfy my basic nutritional needs and nothing further—in three months.  I breathed deeply through my nose to keep the tears at bay, then cleared my throat and answered Barton’s question.  “He was a hero of your Second World War, was he not?”  When I had visited Midgard’s North American continent, some fifty years ago now, I had heard him spoken of with sentiments ranging from reverence to nostalgia to gentle irony to cynical disdain.

“That’s right,” Barton confirmed.  “Then you’ve probably heard how he died heroically destroying some apocalyptic Nazi weapon?  Well, that ‘weapon’ was the Tesseract.  And as luck would have it, it wasn’t destroyed, just inaccessible for a while, and he wasn’t dead, just frozen in polar ice.  S.H.I.E.L.D. retrieved them both, Tesseract and ‘super-soldier,’ not long ago, and revived him from his… hibernation.  He wasn’t too pleased to see what had become of the world while he was napping, but the hero instinct is too strong in him to be resisted for long.  When the fate of the world calls, he’ll answer.”

“Hmm,” was all I said, because my mouth was full.  I was listening, but too entranced by the taste of real food to say much in response.

“So that leaves only one more member of the initiative, and his participation might be more difficult to secure.  His name is Bruce Banner, and he was a physicist, a specialist in gamma radiation—still is, I guess, but he had an accident that… disrupted his career, to say the least.  So now when he gets angry, he turns into… something else.  Something big, green, extremely strong, and completely irrational.  ‘The Hulk’ is the popular name for it.”

I frowned.  “It seems foolish to recruit a soldier who cannot reliably be controlled.”

“Desperate times, desperate measures,” Barton said with a shrug.  “If the Hulk _could_ be controlled, by Banner himself or someone else, he would be an incredibly powerful asset.”

“Even if he could not be controlled, he might still be a powerful asset if deployed properly,” I mused.

“I guess that’s what they’re counting on.”

“No, no, you misunderstand me.  He could be deployed against his keepers, to destroy their resources and unleash chaos.”

“Oh, hmm.”  Barton was taken by surprise; as clever and resourceful as he was, his instincts seemed almost entirely constructive rather than destructive.

With Barton’s descriptions of my opponents in mind, I was already beginning to formulate a plan.  As Barton had hinted, the eclectic diversity of the team could be its greatest strength or its undoing.  The curious phrase he had used to describe Stark, _“Doesn’t play well with others,”_ reverberated in my mind.  I could wait for the team to fall apart on its own, or I could take action to ensure that it did.  But how?

The answer became obvious: I had to let myself be captured.  That would give me an opportunity to plant seeds of doubt among them, perhaps even to use the Mind Stone to sow discord and suspicion.  The hidden roots of that noxious plant would weaken the foundations of the bulwark Fury was trying to build; it would quickly crumble when they attempted to withstand the onslaught of my Chitauri army.

Of course, I would need Barton’s help to escape; I couldn’t very well lead an army from prison.  But that was simple enough.  The most important asset in a successful prison break is a diversion disruptive enough that securing the prisoners is no longer the guards’ most pressing duty.  Barton had just revealed to me what my diversion would be.

The question that remained was where and how to present myself for capture.  I wanted to make a statement, to declare myself to the Earth in a way that showed me to be both frightening and seductive—a fearsome tyrant of the kind that the disaffected masses of so-called democratic nations would secretly, or not so secretly, find appealing.  But I did not want to do it too soon: I needed to know that the portal would be ready to admit the Chitauri as soon as I had finished the work of splintering the Avengers and left them foundering in my wake.

Never far from my mind was the knowledge that I had only a few hours before I had to report to the Other.  The most productive thing I had done—by far—was to enslave Barton to my will, but as yet I had made few concrete moves toward preparing for an invasion.  I did not look forward to telling the Other that my plans were in suspension until some mortal scientist could figure out how to make the Space Stone work.

“You OK, boss?” Barton asked, breaking my reverie.  I realized that I had been staring into space, holding my fork in midair over my plate.

“Yes, of course, just thinking,” I said briskly, then resumed eating.

“When you’re done with breakfast—or lunch, or whatever this is—I can show you to the showers,” Barton offered.

I knew I probably looked disgusting and I wasn’t going to reproach Barton with noticing it.  “Thank you,” I said.  Being clean again sounded like Valhalla.

The bathing room in the old S.H.I.E.L.D. base was, unfortunately, very much like the one in Thanos’s compound on Sanctuary—bleak and utilitarian—but hot water was hot water and soap was soap, and both were immeasurably welcome.  I took the opportunity to wash out my shirt properly, since I could dry it with seiðr (and marvel, once more, that Thanos was not peering in on my mind to see what I was doing).  The only thing I could do for my unruly hair was try to smooth it with some abominable Midgardian product I found in a mirrored cabinet over a sink; magic can do many things easily and instantly, but straightening hair is a task at once too delicate and too trivial for anyone to have trained seiðr to it.  I noted with disgust that the Midgardian slime made locks of my hair curl up in spines like pine boughs; but I told my stubborn vanity that I needed only to look intimidating, not fashionable.

Once I was clean and reasonably presentable, I walked around the base, hoping I wouldn’t get lost.  Even if I did, I could always tap into Barton’s knowledge of its layout, but I preferred not to blur the lines between our minds any more than necessary.  It occurred to me that I could always search through his memories for the knowledge of Agent Romanoff’s crimes, but I still preferred to ask Barton himself.  If nothing else, it preserved the illusion that he was aiding me because he wished to, not because I had burrowed into his mind like some incorporeal parasite.

I tried as much as possible to make my aimless wandering look like purposeful striding—to seem like a king overseeing his domain, secure in his authority and in the love and loyalty of his subjects.  I looked down at the people who passed me (it helped that I was taller than most of them), not with condescension or disdain but with an air of pride in my ownership of them, giving no hint at all that I had no idea who most of them were or what they did.  Or even how to get from one room of my ‘castle’ to another.

But no, I did have some guide, even without Barton’s knowledge: when I stilled my thoughts, I could feel the tug of the Space Stone upon the Mind Stone that powered the scepter in my hand.  I followed it to find the little laboratory where Selvig and his colleagues were attempting to master the Tesseract’s power.  The sharp ring of my boots on concrete gave way to the crunch of coarse sand as the corridor opened onto a room filled with buzzing electronic equipment and bustling with focused, competent-looking people.  Some of them shot me quizzical or alarmed glances, but I put on my best _“I’m definitely supposed to be here”_ face and ignored them, focusing instead on the mental hum coming from the Space Stone.

Through the segmented plastic curtain that shielded the sensitive heart of the laboratory, I could see the Stone in its improvised cradle and Selvig tinkering around it, occasionally pausing to open a little notebook and scribble notes and calculations in it, or else to stare at the notes he had made earlier, tapping his pencil on the page to vent his frustration.  He looked ragged and disheveled—I doubted he had slept at all since we had arrived—but he seemed to buzz as loudly as the electronics around him with his manic energy.  I did not wish to distract him, so I stayed outside the curtain, pressed against a wall so that I would be out of the way of the rushing people who all, unlike me, seemed to know exactly what they needed to be doing.

I focused again on the Space Stone.  It wanted to open a portal, I determined—that was what it was meant to do, after all—but somehow the Mind Stone had conveyed to it that it would only be allowed to fulfill its purpose if the portal could be stabilized.  Together, the Infinity Stones seemed to _know_ how this could be accomplished, and now that they had my attention, they were trying to communicate it to me, but I could make no sense of the language-less information that was pressing into my mind.  If I had years—decades, perhaps—to study their ancient magic, I had no doubt I could achieve it; but it was still too foreign to me, too unlike the methods of Asgardian seiðr in which I had been trained.

But there was another way, they whispered to me.  Science and magic were simply two approaches to the same problem, two ways of manipulating the same natural forces.  Selvig knew enough of Midgardian physics to be able to accomplish our aim, but they could not reach his mind to point him in the right direction.  I could open it for them, make him receptive to the guidance they were trying to send.

That was simple enough, now that I was linked to him through the Mind Stone.  I closed my eyes, followed the bright thread of thoughts that stretched between us to probe at his mind, teeming with mathematical puzzles and possibilities in the peculiar idiom of Midgardian physics.  From there I opened a channel directly between him and the Mind Stone so that the Space Stone could speak to him through it.

How much time had passed?  I was not sure, but I thought I probably had less than four hours before the Other was to contact me.  My stomach seized with apprehension that bordered on fear.  In the past twenty hours, I had already grown used to having privacy in my own mind; I could reach out to others if I wished, but no one could unexpectedly invade my thoughts.  Even now, I had to reach out as well for the Other to be able to speak to me, and I had some warning of when he would contact me; but I was helpless against the pain he would inflict if I failed to cooperate.

Somewhat reluctantly—because I did not wish to be tugging on Barton’s sleeve every time I needed something, as if I truly were his errant child—I sifted through Barton’s knowledge of the layout of the base to find an out-of-the-way corner where I could sit, alone and undisturbed, to think about strategy and prepare myself for the interview with my overseer.  I had never had much patience for meditation, and had submitted to the practice only reluctantly when my queen mother had insisted that it was necessary for mastering my seiðr; now I wished I were more practiced at using it to calm a racing mind and heart.  My stomach, churning with anxiety and unaccustomed to anything even resembling food, threatened to reject what little I had eaten, simple and mild as it was.

I rested my forehead against the cool stone of one of the pillars in my deserted alcove and focused on breathing slowly and deeply.  Plan.  I had a plan, or the beginning of one.  Let myself be captured.  Bring the Mind Stone and my own insidious words among the Avengers to shake them apart.  Have Barton lead an attack, provoking the Hulk in the process, to free me and further undermine my enemies.

When the call came, like a sharp tugging at my thoughts, I answered it almost instantly.  I closed my eyes and sent a stream of thought into the Mind Stone; once again, I had to deliberately hold much of myself back, tightening into a knot the strands that made up my identity, lest the Mind Stone draw all of me into itself, feeding its own hunger with my memory and knowledge.

I found the Other on the surface of Sanctuary, within sight of the pavilion where Thanos’s throne sat.  “The Chitauri grow restless” was his impatient greeting.

I formed a mental image of myself for his benefit, arrayed in all the finery that Thanos had provided for me: helmet, cloak, and gold plating over my armor, the scepter lengthened into a staff.  “Let them gird themselves,” I replied, adopting a haughty air as another cloak and armor.  “I will lead them in a glorious battle.”

“Battle?  Against the meager might of Earth?” Thanos’s underling spat.

“Glorious,” I repeated; “not lengthy.  If your force is as formidable as you claim,” I added in a moment of boldness—an attempt to put _him_ on the defensive, to present myself as an equal contractor rather than a press-ganged errand boy.

I should have known that would not be received well.  “You question _us_?” the Other hissed.  “Question _him_?  He who put the scepter in your hand?  Who gave you ancient knowledge and new purpose when you were cast out—defeated?”

He made it sound as if I had come to _them_ for help, rather than being captured and forced into their service—as if I had _sought_ the “new purpose” they gave me.  No doubt I should have challenged him on those grounds, and would have, if I had been away longer from Thanos’s selective prompting of my memory—perhaps even a few days longer.

As it was, however, what stuck in my throat was the way he described my exile from Asgard: “cast out,” as if I were a disgraced outlaw, condemned by the laws of Asgard or by popular acclaim, rather than illegally deposed by my rightfully banished brother, aided by a few of his treasonous friends.  “I was a king!” I shot back, and was at once dismayed by how petulant I sounded.  “The rightful king of Asgard.  Betrayed.”

“No doubt you’ll fare better on Earth,” the Other taunted me.

“They are a lost people,” I said, thinking of Nietzsche’s words on democracy, on the misguided desire of the mediocre masses to guide their own lives according to their hedonistic whims.  “They mistake selfishness for spirit.  When the sky falls, it will be every man for himself.”

“How will you rule them, then?” he sneered.

“Unmercifully.”  For if Nietzsche wrote truly about the Midgardians of the modern democratic age, _“the claim for independence…, for_ laisser aller _is pressed most hotly by the very people for whom no reins would be too strict.”_

The Other sneered again (or snarled, rather) and scoffed, “Your ambition is little, and born of childish need.  We look beyond the Earth, to greater worlds the Tesseract will unveil.”

Again, if I had been fully in command of my own mind for longer, I might have pointed out how rich it was for him to belittle my ambition when it was not my ambition to begin with—though he surely would have considered my original ambition to dominate the market for stolen goods in the Andromeda Galaxy even smaller than the “new purpose” Thanos had given me.  Instead I retorted, “You don’t have the Tesseract yet”—another feeble, foolish attempt to claim some leverage in this bargain.

He rushed at me, his eerie six-fingered hand curved into a claw that reached for my face as if to scratch out my eyes.  Though I knew I was worlds away and he could not touch me, my stomach still seemed to leap into my throat, and it took a great force of will to maintain my haughty, untroubled demeanor.

“I don’t threaten,” I said, refusing to flinch before his attack.  “But until I open the doors—until your force is mine to command—you are but words.”

“You will have your war, Asgardian,” the Other promised, and his low, measured voice frightened me more than all his spitting and snarling.  He stepped closer to me—no, to my projected image, I reminded myself—so that I could see all too clearly the corpselike pallor and waxiness of his skin, the bloody fangs beneath his gilded mask.  “If you fail,” he warned, beginning to circle me while I stood frozen like a mouse in the eye of a snake, “if the Tesseract is kept from us, there will be no Realm, no barren moon, no crevice where he cannot find you.”  And oh, how I believed him.

“You think you know pain?” he whispered, and then it started to build, that all-too-familiar pressure in my skull— _I should not have challenged him, should not have tried to assert any power of my own_ —and was that wrenching in my gut his doing, or my own terror, or both?  “He will make you long for something sweet as pain…”  The pressure was sharpening into a stabbing in my temple and I could not stop the tears from pricking my eyes as his clawed fingers reached up to touch my face—

The pain released me at the same time as the tugging from the Mind Stone, indicating that the Other was through with me for now, and I wrenched myself away from the connection so sharply that I physically jerked my head to one side (little good though that did).

I sat there until my breathing calmed, and focused on what I could control.  My plan, I had a plan… But when could I put it into action?  When would Selvig know how to open a stable portal through the Tesseract?  I reached for him through the Mind Stone—and found that he had made an important breakthrough; he was close to achieving his goal—which was to say, my goal.

I followed the thread that linked our minds back to his little curtained-off laboratory.  As I approached, I saw that Barton was already there speaking to Selvig, his back turned toward me.  He was holding up one of his various screened electronic devices—why he needed so many of them and what they all did I could not imagine, nor could I be bothered to go digging around in Barton’s knowledge to find out—and asking, “This the stuff you need?”

“Yeah, iridium,” Selvig confirmed, still tinkering with his own mysterious electronic devices as he spoke.  “It’s found in meteorites, it forms antiprotons.  It’s very hard to get hold of.”

“Especially if S.H.I.E.L.D. knows you need it,” Barton remarked dryly.

“Well, I didn’t know,” Selvig exclaimed, gesturing somewhat carelessly with the sharp objects he was holding.  His electric blue eyes were wide and manic, and widened even more with his delight as he saw me coming.  “Hey!” he hailed me.  I could not recall the last time someone had greeted my approach with such a warm, exuberant smile; perhaps Thor had, once, when we were young and unmarred by jealousy.

“The Tesseract has shown me so much,” Selvig gushed; his smile had turned beatific.  “It’s more than knowledge, it’s—truth.”

I resisted the urge to tell him why that statement made no sense.  No doubt the information conveyed to him by the Space Stone had seemed like a deliverance from the mouth of God—a noetic contact with the essence of things—given as it was without having to be wrested by hard intellectual labor from the obscure evidence presented by nature; and the Mind Stone had probably aided in imbuing it with an aura of ultimate authority.

“I know,” I said indulgently, returning his smile.  “It, ah—it touches everyone differently.  What did it show you, Agent Barton?” I added (with a touch of irony that no doubt escaped Selvig completely).

“My next target,” Barton answered grimly, turning to face me.

Selvig chuckled, a little uncomfortably.  “Stick in the mud; he’s got no soul.  No wonder you chose this, this _tomb_ to work in!”

“Well, the Radisson doesn’t have three levels of lead-lined flooring between S.H.I.E.L.D. and that cube,” Barton shot back.

Selvig raised his eyebrows, trying to look skeptical but mostly looking chagrined, and turned back to his work.  Barton, too, turned away, sighing and shaking his head, and I followed him down the hallway away from the makeshift laboratory.

“Jesus, he really doesn’t like me,” Barton muttered when we were at some distance.

“I’m afraid not,” I replied, trying to sound sympathetic.  I cleared my throat and added, “Though… I understand his complaint about the setting.  In truth, I… I weary of scuttling in shadow.”  My frustration, inching toward desperation after my interview with the Other, was bleeding through the raw edge of my voice.  “I mean to rule this world, not burrow in it.”  It came out almost a growl.

Barton understood what I intended.  “It’s a risk,” he pointed out levelly.

The feral grin I gave him must have made me look half-mad, and not without reason.  “Oh, yes.”

“If you’re set on making yourself known, it could be useful,” Barton reflected—thinking through logistics and strategy as swiftly as ever.

 _I could be useful!_ I marveled to myself.  _Finally._   “Tell me what you need.”

Barton had led us to the open back of a vehicle loaded with supplies—including, apparently, his favored weapon, a mechanical bow that he unfolded with a rapid wrist movement and a crisp metallic click.  “I need a distraction,” he said briskly.  With a mischievous glint in his eye that made me proud to call him my ally (or would have, had it only been by choice), he added, “And an eyeball.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Almost forgot to attribute the Nietzsche quote! "...the claim for independence…, for _laisser aller_ is pressed most hotly by the very people for whom no reins would be too strict" is from _Twilight of the Idols_ Part IX ("Skirmishes of an Untimely Man"), section 41 ("Freedom which I do _not_ mean").


	14. Stuttgart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loki buys a suit, eats something closely resembling shawarma, goes to the opera, extracts an eyeball, gives a speech, and gets captured, exactly as planned.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gah, I really meant to get to the conversation/confrontation with Thor this chapter, but details keep happening. Sorry-not sorry for all that stuff about the opera; this is my Loki, and his priorities are... unusual.

Barton’s next target, and the owner of the eyeball he needed, was Heinrich Schäfer, the man in possession of the iridium that Selvig needed to stabilize the portal through the Tesseract.  The eyeball was necessary because the iridium was in a heavily secured area that required a retinal scan to access.  Iridium and eyeball were both located in Stuttgart—a moderately large city in the southwest of Germany, in case you were wondering.  Not famous for much except being the birthplace of Hegel (an overrated philosopher if there ever was one), being in the heart of Germany’s richest wine-growing region (alas that my errand left me no time for fine Riesling…), and having a lovely opera house that draws some of Midgard’s best performers.

As it happened, Herr Schäfer was scheduled to speak at a charity fundraising event at the opera house the next evening, which worked perfectly for our purposes: there was a time when we knew exactly where to find him (without even having to break into his personal files); it would be in a public place with an already-assembled crowd, so attacking him would be sure to draw a lot of attention; and since the charity gala was scheduled after an early evening opera, I could even attend the performance before I was needed to acquire the eyeball.  No doubt you think me hideously frivolous or callous for such a consideration… and yes, all right, I was, and am.  But I will say in my defense that it had been half a century since I had last visited Midgard and I still admire the magnificent art that Midgardians create, and in such quantities!  Perhaps the brevity of their lives impels them to fill their days with as much beauty as possible, in as concentrated a form as possible.

It was already early morning in Germany (“time zones” are a pitfall for the unwary traveler in Midgard), but Barton assured me we could get to Stuttgart by mid-afternoon: along with the base, S.H.I.E.L.D. had abandoned two flying crafts called that Barton called ‘Quinjets.’  They were of an older model than S.H.I.E.L.D. was currently using, and had been in some disrepair; but among the orders he had given in the first few hours after we arrived, Barton had set several technicians to renovating them, and now they were in perfect working order.

The next item of business, I pointed out to Barton, was to find me appropriate attire for attending the opera.  A glamor might have been sufficient under different circumstances, but since glamors dissipate upon contact and I would be manhandling my victim before I wanted to reveal myself in full regalia (not to mention risking accidental brushes with members of the crowd), I needed actual clothing that I could switch out for my kingly armor with the use of pocket dimensions.  (As I have mentioned, the choreography of pageantry is a fine art for which I have the utmost respect and, dare I say it, something of a knack.)

Barton informed me that there was probably nowhere in the immediate vicinity of the base where suitable clothing could be found: the nearest town, as he eloquently explained, was “West Bumfuck, Arkansas.”  (Yes, I love how such expressions come through in the All-Tongue: metaphors that were dead for the speakers of the language come vividly alive; obscenities that have been worn to banality by frequent use regain all their piquancy.)  So I would have to do my shopping in Stuttgart when we arrived, in the few hours before the start of the show.

Barton and I rummaged through a room full of spare clothing that had been available to agents needing to change out of their own soiled or ruined garments or go out incognito.  Eventually we found an acceptable outfit that fit me, more or less: dark slender jeans, a tad too wide at the waist, but easily cinched with a belt; brown leather shoes with just a bit too much room in the toe; a slightly rumpled light-blue shirt, closed by a line of small black buttons in the front, whose sleeves I rolled up to disguise the fact that they did not quite reach my wrists.

Barton presented me with a few other items necessary to my masquerade.  The first was a forged passport (a Midgardian document that permits travel between their myriad splintered nations) identifying me as a citizen of the United States of America with the name Lucas Godfrey.  The second was a _credit card_ in that name: a piece of plastic that, as the term suggests, extends credit to the holder by committing a bank to pay vendors for items purchased, in exchange for the promise that the holder will repay the bank by a later date, with interest if the payment is delayed.  The final item was a screened electronic device somewhat smaller than the ones I usually saw Barton using, which he called a _Starkphone—_ “Yes, that Stark,” he confirmed with a small eyeroll when I shot him a questioning glance.  He showed me how to operate it by touching symbols on the screen in order to call to his own phone so that I could speak with him, or to search the _Internet_ (a realm-wide communication system with a surprising combination of powers and limitations) for information, including a map of my current surroundings.

Barton’s reasons for having me pose as an American were, as he explained, twofold: it was easier to fabricate American documents with the old S.H.I.E.L.D. equipment on short notice; and it could be used to explain away any confusion or hesitation I showed in my transactions in Stuttgart.  If anyone asked why I seemed to speak German with a flawless accent and grammar, Barton instructed me, I should tell them that my parents were American professors who had lived in Freiburg until I was ten, when they moved to Cambridge (which, he said, would explain why I also seemed to speak English with a flawless and aristocratic British accent).

Once I had donned my temporary disguise, mastered my alias, and been instructed in the use of the phone and credit card, I joined Barton and two of his recruits in one of the newly refurbished Quinjets.  The external door to the hangar—which had been concealed as a rocky cliff face on the side of the hill into which the base had been dug—rose with an appalling screech (“I didn’t think to have someone oil that,” Barton said, wincing), and then we were off.

The recruits co-piloted while in the passenger cabin Barton and I worked out the outlines of a plan for my escape from S.H.I.E.L.D.’s ‘Helicarrier’ (a flying fortress of sorts… on which more anon).  Then he briefed me on the life and crimes of Natasha Romanoff, the details of which were predictably gruesome but not entirely to the point here.  I hoped the information would prove useful in my effort to shake the Avengers apart, if Agent Romanoff was, as Barton had said, still tormented by her past.  And I thought it would be more useful than an accounting of the deaths for which Tony Stark’s weapons were responsible: as a public figure, he was no doubt confronted with his sins often enough that he was no longer terribly shaken by it, and had some glib response prepared.  So few people even knew about Agent Romanoff’s deeds that she would likely be caught completely off-guard by a stranger’s recitation of them.

After six hours or so we landed in a field outside Stuttgart—one of many concealed landing pads that S.H.I.E.L.D. maintained around the world, and which Barton’s satellite monitoring had informed him was unoccupied.  A ramp was lowered from the Quinjet, and Barton opened a panel in the wall to reveal a sleek black two-wheeled vehicle known as a _motorcycle_ (it differs from bicycles in that it is powered, like automobiles, by fossil fuels rather than by the rider’s own legs, and can therefore go considerably faster).

Barton presented me with a black plastic globe with a partly detached clear panel in the front, then put a similar one on his own head, which indicated that this was some odd sort of helmet.  “I’m afraid you’re going to have to ride bi— behind me, sir,” he said.  He almost succeeded in concealing the slight stumble in his speech, but I noticed his rapid self-correction.

“I’m going to have to ride… _what_ were you going to say?” I asked mock-warningly.

Barton flushed red under the bizarre helmet.  “Um… I was going to say ‘ride bitch,’ but I know my wife really doesn’t like that expression, so I’ve tried to stop using it… and I thought you probably wouldn’t like it either.”

“You’ll have to explain its significance to me, Agent Barton.”

“It’s, uh… well, traditionally motorcycles have mostly been ridden by men, but if the rider is with a woman, she’ll usually sit behind him and hold on.”  He cleared his throat unnecessarily.

I raised my eyebrows.  “Perhaps that is not the wisest expression to use with reference to your superior.”

“Honestly, I think Director Fury would just laugh—people are always telling him he looks like that one actor from _Pulp Fiction_ … you know what, forget it.”

I gathered from Barton’s mind that _Pulp Fiction_ was a famous Midgardian film, but for the most part I was as confused as you are.  I decided not to pursue the matter.

I put on the odd helmet (which was even worse for my peripheral vision than my old ceremonial helmet), sat behind Barton, and held on to his waist as firmly as I could without injuring him (when dealing with mortals, we must bear in mind our own strength and their relative fragility).  We rode into Stuttgart over an assortment of fields, cow paths, unpaved farm roads, and finally, as we neared the city, the black tar roads Midgardians are so fond of.

Barton stopped at the side of a street a little ways out from the city center, lined with trees and the many-storied buildings divided into individual residences that Midgardian city-dwellers tend to rent on a temporary basis.  “The shopping district is a bit of a walk from here,” Barton told me, “but I wasn’t betting on my ability to find parking any closer.  Anyway, I need to do a bit of my own reconnaissance.”  I dismounted and handed my helmet back to him; he latched it onto the back of the seat that I’d been using.  “Downtown is that way,” he said, pointing, “but you can also use your phone for navigation.  Don’t worry about roaming charges—S.H.I.E.L.D. will cover it,” he said with a crooked grin.

I didn’t bother either asking or searching his knowledge for an explanation.  I just gave him a blank stare; he said “Again, forget it,” his smile turning sheepish; and then he rode away.

Occasionally consulting the Starkphone for reference (it was a bit clumsy to use, as one would expect with Midgardian technology, but surprisingly helpful), I made my way into the center of the city.  In some ways it reminded me of the smaller cities in the Nova Empire, bustling with people who all seemed to be in a hurry, most of them looking down at their own Starkphones rather than at each other.  I found myself envying Midgardians for their ability to carry their own world around with them, so that they shared space but not really a _world_ with the strangers surrounding them.

Back at the base I had searched for the names of well-reputed clothiers and found one that I thought would suit (villainous pun not entirely intended).  The place was known for its tailoring, though I regretted that I had no time to get something properly fitted and would have to buy it ready-made.  I walked in and instantly felt comfortable in a way I had not anywhere else since arriving in Midgard: this was a fashion that had barely changed since the mid-nineteenth century; these garments—the crisp-collared linen shirts, the slim clean-lined jackets and trousers of fine sturdy fabric—were familiar to me from visits to Midgard fifty years ago, ninety years ago, one hundred and thirty years ago.

I was scanning the racks of elegant suits in a dizzying variety of colors and fabrics (wool heavy and light, in charcoal and silver; black silk and midnight-blue; finely patterned cashmere and undyed beige linen…) when a middle-aged man, dressed in a well-fitted suit of the same steel-gray as his hair, approached me and asked, “May I be of assistance, sir?”

“Possibly,” I said distractedly, and then my eye fell on something unusual but strangely appealing: a black three-piece suit (oh, sorry, Midgardian fashion term—it means that there’s a vest that goes over the shirt and under the jacket) whose jacket was the length of a coat, reaching below the knee of the trousers it was paired with.  It was an uncommon style in Midgard, but its silhouette reminded me, pleasingly, of the long leather coat I wore as part of my armor.

“That is an odd-looking suit,” I remarked, gesturing at it.

The man pursed his lips, looking displeased.  “We have an in-house designer whose unique creativity is often a great asset to our business, but sometimes her experiments can get a bit… carried away.”

“I find that I quite like it,” I said genially.  “Might I try it on?”

The man did not conceal his disapproval, but he asked, “Do you know your measurements, sir?”

Not in any Midgardian units, I didn’t, and even in the Asgardian measuring system I suspected that my knowledge was out of date, considering how much weight I had lost recently.  “It has been some time since I was measured for a suit,” I told him.

“No matter,” he said.  He looked me up and down with a practiced eye, pulled one of the few complete suits from behind its brethren, went to another wall and pulled a folded white shirt from a shelf, then handed it all to me and led me to a small curtained compartment in the back of the shop.  There I exchanged the cobbled-together Midgardian garb from the old S.H.I.E.L.D. base for the sleek new suit, which fit remarkably well—the salesman certainly knew his trade.  When I emerged, the man gave a grudging nod.  “It looks surprisingly good on you,” he allowed.  “Of course we will have to take it in at the waist and shoulders…”

“I’m afraid there isn’t time.  I quite unexpectedly received tickets to the opera and the charity gala tonight and needed to find appropriate clothing in something of a hurry…”

“No matter,” he said again.  “It can be finished in less than two hours, and you can pick it up in plenty of time.  Go and get something to eat while you wait; perhaps you will save us some of the work.”

I laughed politely and thanked him.  He produced a box of pins from a pocket of his jacket and began pinning the fabric of my coat and trousers, not too snugly so that I still had room to move (and eat).  When, in short order, he was finished, he pointed out, “You’ll want to choose a tie.”

I changed back into my own rather shabby clothing, handed the suit back over to the salesman, and followed him to another wall with an assortment of neckties—another odd artifact of Midgardian fashion; no, they don’t really serve a purpose.  Most of the colors and patterns struck me as too gaudy, so I simply picked out a slender black one.

The salesman gave me his look of polite disapproval again.  “I think that might make you look rather like an undertaker or a security agent.”

“Do you have a suggestion to avoid that outcome?”

He thought for a moment, his head tilted to one side.  “A scarf, perhaps?”  There was a small rack of them beside the selection of neckties.  It took me only a moment to spot the one I wanted.  Pale gold silk, patterned with rich dark green: my colors.

I paid for the whole ensemble—suit (with tailoring work), shirt, tie, and scarf, as well as black leather shoes and a pair of simple black cufflinks I was told I needed (cufflinks are… oh, never mind, it’s not important)—with the credit card that had been fabricated for me at the S.H.I.E.L.D. base.  It all seemed to cost an outrageous amount of Midgardian money, but their machine accepted the credit card without any difficulty, and the cashier’s quick glance at my passport, to confirm that the name matched the credit card and the picture matched my face, revealed nothing out of order.

As I had been instructed, I went to find food in the neighborhood of the shop; it had been some hours since my last meal, and I was enjoying my freedom to eat genuine food (with actual flavor!) when I wished.  I was drawn by smell to a place whose name was written in Turkish as well as German, which sold shavings of seasoned meat slow-cooked on a spit, wrapped in bread along with fresh vegetables; the menu informed me that this was called a _dürüm döner._ I ordered one along with a bottle of some local beer, and was favorably impressed by both.  I did not recall that the food had been so interesting the last time I was in Germany (which, admittedly, was almost a century earlier); it seems that it has benefited from the mingling of populations and cultures, which I hoped to accelerate once I had established my reign over Midgard.

As promised, the suit was ready in good time for me to make the opera, which began at six in the evening.  I tried everything on again in the small curtained room and was well-pleased with the improved fit, the sleek line of the coat, the tasteful accent of the scarf.  I stowed my makeshift clothing in the garment bag for the suit (to be disposed of in a pocket dimension while a glamor encouraged people to look away) and walked to the opera house clad in the height of Midgardian style.  I made myself temporarily invisible to enter the theater without a ticket, stood against a back wall until the audience had settled and the music had begun, then chose one of the seats that were (as always) left empty.

The opera to be performed before the gala was, by design, a short one: _Elektra,_ composed at the beginning of the last century by a German named Richard Strauss.  It was based on a myth that originated in Greece but has become a staple of literature throughout Europe and its cultural scions, the tragic tale of the House of Agamemnon—a family that, unbelievably, makes my own look healthy, functional, and loving.

Agamemnon was a king and general who led an army to Troy to take back his brother’s absconded wife (and therein lies another tale or ten!).  But the general offended a virgin goddess, who caged the winds and would not allow his fleet to sail to Troy unless, as a seer instructed him, he sacrificed his virgin daughter Iphigenia to her.  He sent for her, telling his wife, Clytemnestra, that he planned to wed Iphigenia to the greatest of his warriors.  But when she came to the altar, dressed as a bride, she was not married but slain; and the goddess, true to her word, released the winds so the fleet might sail to war.  Clytemnestra was enraged; she took a lover, Aegisthus, and plotted to kill her husband if he should return from war alive.  After ten years of fighting he comes home, victorious, and as they had planned Clytemnestra and Aegisthus throw a net over him like a fish and stab him in the bath.  Her son Orestes remains in exile, fearing a similar fate; her second daughter Elektra—despite what befell her sister—dreams of revenge upon Clytemnestra and her lover, and prays for Orestes’ return.

Strauss’s opera revolves around Elektra’s obsession with revenge for her father: she haunts the house like an unquiet spirit, lamenting the eternal stain upon it; she tells her mother that the only sacrificial animal that will appease the gods and stop her nightmares is Clytemnestra herself.  The household receives word that Orestes is dead, and Elektra resolves to avenge her father herself; but then Orestes returns, disguised as a messenger who claims he was with Orestes at his death.  Elektra recognizes him, is ecstatic when she hears him execute her mother, herself leads Aegisthus in to the slaughter.  But amid her mad triumphant dance to celebrate her brother’s victory, Elektra collapses and dies.

Strauss’s music is eerie, dissonant, atonal, appropriate to the unsettled, unsettling content of the play.  This was not exactly the pleasant respite I had hoped for when I thought to see an opera before I went to do murder:  I found myself sympathizing with Elektra’s maddening thirst for parricide, though my desire was to kill not my mother but my father—either of them—any of them (again, in one instance, though with different words this time!), and to avenge no one but myself.  I saw myself in Elektra as the household servants spoke of how she had allowed herself to be exiled from her royal state: forced to sleep on the doorstep in rags, fed on the floor with the dogs and struck like a dog, exposed to the kicks and mockery of master and servant alike.  I saw myself, too, in Orestes—exiled, believed to be mad and then to be dead (to the great relief of his mother), only to return when least expected and bring down revenge unlooked-for.  It fed my rage at Odin and Thor—and, yes, at Thanos, though as yet I could think of no way to avenge myself upon him.  Use his Chitauri army to conquer Earth, hold it and the Tesseract secure, and wait.

When the opera was over, I made myself invisible again and waited while the bows and applause wound down, the audience streamed out, and black-clad stage hands took down the strangely modern-looking set in order to clear the stage for a different opera to be performed the following evening.  When they had finished, I sat in the dark and listened to the faint strains of European music from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—pleasant, soothing, nothing like the tempestuous modern opera that had just played—accompanying the soft rumble of people talking and laughing, the occasional clink of glasses, silverware, and china.  The gala had only just begun, and Herr Schäfer was not scheduled to speak until an hour into it.  That was when I would make my entrance and my attack.

It had been only fifteen hours since the last time I had made contact with the Other, but it seemed likely that I would not have access to the scepter in nine hours’ time.  I pulled it from the pocket dimension where I had been storing it until it was needed and used it to reach out over the invisible wire that stretched across galaxies.

 _“Yes?  What is it?”_ I heard from the other end.  Neither of us bothered with a visual image, but sent words only.

_“My plans are proceeding apace.  In one play I will obtain the last thing needed to stabilize the Tesseract’s portal, announce myself to the people of Earth, and infiltrate the halls of my opponents.”_

_“You mean to allow yourself to be captured?”_ He saw through my words to my intentions, and his mental voice was skeptical.

_“I know what I’m doing.”_

_“You need not reassure_ me _of that.  It is not upon_ my _head that the cost of your failure will fall.”_

I bristled but replied bluntly, _“No, it isn’t.  I’m contacting you now because I probably won’t be reachable twenty-four hours after our last conversation, so I’m resetting the clock.  Try twenty-four hours from now.”_

The Other sounded dubious when he said _“Very well.  In twenty-four hours, then.  I trust you have not forgotten the consequences of failing to respond.”_

I didn’t even dignify that with a reply; I simply cut off the connection.

At last I heard the music quiet, a somewhat louder clink of metal on glass—this is how Midgardians of a certain class in the northwest quarter of the realm customarily get the attention of a crowded room—and then a lone man’s voice speaking, the words indistinct.  That was my cue.  I hid the cruel blades of the scepter with a glamor, so that it appeared to be no more than an oddly ornamented walking stick, and left the theater.  I paused at a balcony overlooking the lobby and reception space to locate my victim and then proceeded down the stairs, ever mindful of the dignified impression I must make.

The first person I encountered at the base of the stairs, with a wired earpiece and a name badge, appeared to be some kind of official security personnel, so I flipped the “cane” around in my hand and knocked him aside, using the scepter as a club.  Then I gripped Herr Schäfer by the back of his neck, dragged him to an ancient sculpture of a recumbent bull that would serve well as a sacrificial altar, and flipped him onto his back on its flat golden surface.  I pulled from an inner pocket of my coat something else that Barton had provided me with: a tool that could extract material from a surface it was applied to and send a scan to its mate, which Barton had in his possession.  Usually it was used to send a virtual sample of soil or stone, but it would work just as well for an eyeball—though unfortunately for the possessor of the eyeball, it still needed to extract the desired material from its surroundings in order to scan it.

People had begun gasping and muttering and backing away in confusion as soon as I had struck the security guard, but when the whirring device began digging out Schäfer’s eye—then they truly started to panic, screaming and shoving and trampling each other in their haste to flee for the doors.  This, this was power of a kind I had not possessed since Thanos had taken me prisoner.  Not the power to seize a man and maim him: that I had never lost.  No doubt I could have injured or even killed several of Thanos’s Chitauri guards before the rest of them overpowered me and beat me senseless, then delivered me to Thanos’s tender mercies.  No, the power was in the way these people perceived and reacted to my simple act of violence.  They were terrified and confused; they did not know what to think of me, other than to fear me.  They needed someone to tell them what to think, and would take instruction from someone whom they feared.

It was a perfect time, therefore, to reveal myself in my imposing regal armor and instruct them as I had planned, with the advice of Ermann (of fond, regretful memory) and Thanos.  Behind a shimmer of green-gold light (which would conceal any hitches in the process as well as inviting greater awe) I switched my elegant Midgardian garb for the full armor I had stored in a pocket dimension, complete with long green cloak and horned golden helmet.  The scepter, I had found, could be extended into a staff the length of a spear, which reminded me—half pleasingly and half painfully—of the intimidating impression that Gungnir made in the hand of a king of Asgard.

I strode out through the opera house doors at a pace that might be described as leisurely, following the screaming crowd whose haste was impeded by their numbers as well as their confusion.  A white automobile painted with the word for Midgardian law enforcement was approaching at speed, lights flashing and hideous horn blaring, so I aimed a blast of energy at it from the scepter that flipped it over in its tracks.

A crowd had gathered in the plaza before the opera house.  Instead of dispersing, which might have been wiser, the people had huddled like sheep, away (they thought) from the immediate danger but still in the orbit of the cataclysm, drawn in as if morbid fascination were a kind of gravity that it exerted in proportion to its horror and enormity.  Such clustering is sometimes an advantageous strategy for prey animals to avoid drawing the attention of the predator, but in this case it was exactly what the predator wanted.  I created a few simulacra of myself, standing on tables where people had abandoned their half-drunk beer glasses and holding the scepter-staff menacingly, to surround the plaza and pen them in; they, of course, had no way of knowing that these illusions could not hurt them.

“Kneel before me,” my doubles and I ordered the crowd of shrieking, terrified mortals.  That part of my spiel was partly thanks to Ermann: he had advised me that the best way to capture an audience’s attention is to ask them (or in this case, command them) to do something.  When he was giving a presentation for his company, he told me very seriously, he liked to start with an imperative: _“Imagine yourself doing X,” “Raise your hand if you’ve ever done Y,” “Look at the person to your left, then look at the person to your right.”_ (Telling them to kneel, specifically, was not his idea; that, I explained to him, is simply the proper obeisance due to kings.)

In this case I was having some trouble capturing their attention because they were all still screaming and milling about, so I raised my voice, magically amplified it for good measure, and tried again.  “I said”—I punctuated it by bringing the end of my staff down on the pavement, sending out a pulse of blue light and a hint of suggestion from the Mind Stone— _“KNEEL!”_

They got it that time.  Gradually, the crowd knelt, some of them looking up at me, dumbfounded, some of them casting their eyes down to try to avoid my gaze.

Time to make my case to the people, as Ermann had put it when we spoke of this as my ‘campaign speech.’  “Is not this simpler?” I began (the imperative, you see, was crucial to my lead-in).  “Is this not your natural state?”  I began walking among my soon-to-be subjects, wading hip-deep through a sea of kneeling bodies.  “It’s the unspoken truth of humanity that you crave subjugation.  The bright lure of freedom diminishes your life’s joy in a mad scramble for power, for identity.  You were made to be ruled.  In the end, you will always kneel.”

 _“Keep it short, keep it simple,”_ I had been advised.  Alas for Nietzsche!  If only I could have read to them from _Beyond Good and Evil.  “‘You shall obey—someone and for a long time:_ else _you will perish and lose the last respect for yourself’—this appears to be the moral imperative of nature…”_ But no; moral imperatives of nature were not material for an appeal to the masses.  “In the end, you will always kneel” would have to do.

An old man in the crowd stood up.  “Not to men like you,” he said.

I smiled.  “There are no men like me.”

“There are always men like you,” he rejoined.

I knew enough of Midgardian history to understand the comparison he was trying to evoke—to a petty nationalist tyrant, obsessed with notions of racial purity and imagined historical insults to his nation.  Not all tyrants are alike, however.  I hoped to be an Alexander, a Napoleon—perhaps you have heard those names?—who had genuinely grand vision for humanity, who sought to unite its far-flung nations into a single civilization, a single Realm.  Such tyrants have been conspicuously missing from Midgardian history in the two centuries, now, since Napoleon’s defeat, replaced by small-minded autocrats who seek only to aggrandize their insignificant nations or themselves.

But alas, I doubted that I could explain such subtleties to this mortal.  Now was certainly not the time to try, because this old man appeared to be showing me up, which would not do at all.  I wondered whether I could use the Mind Stone from a distance to compel him to kneel, as the Other had wiped my mind blank and compelled me to come with him unresistingly by pressing the scepter to my chest.  Well, even if that did not work, I could always kill him.  Heartless, I know; but Thanos had warned me: _“Do not waste your time trying to make them love you; love for a ruler must be built over time, by slow courtship.  A conqueror’s best weapon is fear.”_

“Look to your elder, people,” I said with a chilly smile.  “Let him be an example.”

I pointed the scepter at the old man.  But I never got to find out whether the beam of energy I had directed him would bend him to my will or simply kill him, because it was deflected by a shield of red and blue with a silver star in the middle, borne by a man wearing the most ridiculous red, white, and blue costume I had ever seen (complete with silver wings painted on the blue helmet).  It was Captain America himself, protecting the weak and innocent with the famous shield that Barton had told me was made of vibranium, the hardest and most resilient substance known in Midgard.  I believed it; the force of my own blast ricocheting off the shield knocked me to my hands and knees among the kneeling mortals.

“You know, the last time I was in Germany and saw a man standing above everybody else, we ended up disagreeing,” the good captain said.  His ‘aw-shucks,’ simple-man-of-the-people manner instantly irritated me.  And again, the complete lack of discriminating taste among tyrants!  I found myself wishing that the iridium I needed had not been in Germany; then perhaps people would not keep making this all-too-obvious but utterly inappropriate comparison.

“The soldier.”  My acknowledgment was as dismissive and contemptuous as his opening salvo deserved.  “The man out of time.”

“I’m not the one who’s out of time,” he replied.  Admittedly, I had stepped into that one.  Apparently terrible puns are the province of cartoonish heroes as well as villains.

What he was referring to was the arrival of a Quinjet rather like the one in which Barton and I had flown here, albeit in somewhat better repair.  “Loki, drop the weapon and stand down,” said a woman’s voice, electronically amplified, from the Quinjet, while some sort of weapon was lowered from its belly.

S.H.I.E.L.D. backup, evidently.  I fired a blast of energy from the scepter at the wing of the plane, but it swerved just in time.  And then Captain America attacked me, using only that absurd shield as a weapon.  His enhanced strength was obvious, and served him reasonably well.  Eventually I relieved him of the shield (“disarmed” seems like an odd word to use in this context) and pinned him in a crouching position, the butt of my staff against his helmet.  “Kneel,” I ordered him, mocking; but “Not today,” he retorted, and pushed me away to launch a flying kick at my face.

Of a sudden some strange, raucous… music, I suppose one would call it, sounded from the sky above us.  It seemed to be coming from the S.H.I.E.L.D. Quinjet, though it struck me as… out of character.  It was followed by the approach of a small luminous object that looked like a comet with its tail streaming after it.  It resolved into the shape of a man in a red and gold metallic suit of armor just before it shot two blasts of light and energy from its hands, powerful enough to rival my scepter, and powerful enough to knock me (somewhat painfully) on my back against a set of stone steps.  Since my plan was to let myself be captured, this seemed like a good time to make a show of losing (before my back took any more abuse), so I loosened my hold on the scepter and let it go flying out of my hands.

Iron Man (which is to say, Tony Stark) stood up from the small crater his impact had made in the bricks of the plaza and aimed all the various weapons attached to his suit at me.  “Make a move, Reindeer Games,” he said.  Was that supposed to mean something?  Where was Barton when I needed his cultural knowledge?  He seemed to have left the city already with the iridium he had come for.  I searched through his mind at a distance for “reindeer games” and came up with a very silly song and another film title, so I dismissed it as a foolish jest.  I pushed my helmet, cloak, and other ornamentation into their pocket dimension and raised my hands in surrender.

“Good move,” Stark said lightly, retracting his various weapons—which would have been a very _bad_ move if I truly had not wanted to go with them.

“Mr. Stark,” Captain Rogers greeted him, still breathing hard, his face sheened with sweat.  His voice was tight and his expression pinched in a way that suggested he was not happy to see the armored man.

“Cap’n,” Stark replied, sounding equally unenthusiastic.  This boded well indeed.  So far everything was going exactly to plan.

Since the scepter was out of my hands, I was not sure whether the message would reach him, but I found the thread that linked my mind with Barton’s and sent two words: _“I’m in.”_

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case you're wondering why the opera Loki sees is Strauss's _Elektra_ , I looked up what was showing during the Oper Stuttgart's [2011-2012 season](https://www.oper-stuttgart.com/schedule/archive/seasons/season-2011-12/) and that was one of the revivals. I couldn't figure out what dates that one was being performed, but I did end up ruling out some of the others either because the website indicated that they weren't on in April 2012 or because they were too long to plausibly be performed before another event. _Elektra_ worked best because it's only one act (most performances seem to run a little under 2 hours) AND I got to draw out some fun resonances with Loki's dysfunctional family.


	15. What Follows

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loki has a chat with Thor that makes him start rethinking some things, and enjoys another show put on by Thor and some of the Avengers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Chapter-specific warnings:** Brief suicidal thinking; reference to canonical suicide attempt.

The “Avengers” directed the poor terrified people of Stuttgart to clear the plaza so that they could land their Quinjet in order to load me (as well as Stark and Rogers) onto it.  I was ushered into a seat in the passenger hold and Rogers (whose hands, unlike Stark’s, were unencumbered by metal gauntlets) fastened some restraints over me; I was not sure whether this was intended for my safety or for theirs.

“So, Loki,” said Stark.  He had removed his helmet, revealing the decently well-made face of a man in his middle years, with large dark eyes and a closely trimmed beard.  Rogers had also removed the cowl that covered his (predictably) golden hair and blandly handsome face, but maintained tight-lipped silence (Romanoff, meanwhile, was busy helping to maneuver the craft out of the city).

I turned my gaze to Stark and raised my eyebrows inquiringly.

“What’s all this about?  What’s the goal here?  Beyond making the world free from freedom, whatever that means.”

I smiled knowingly but said nothing.

“Well, that’s just rude,” he remarked to no one in particular.

I pulled my eyebrows up and the edges of my mouth down in an expression that said _‘You’re not wrong’_ but kept my silence.

“You think he’ll talk to you?” he asked Rogers.  “You seemed to be having a nice chat when I dropped in.”

I rolled my eyes.  More cartoon-hero puns.

“Not really,” Rogers said tersely.

“To which?  The nice chat, or thinking he’ll talk?”

“Both.”

“Oh, come on.  I know I’m kind of a schmuck, but who could ignore Captain America?”  He leaned on the words just slightly, lending them a readily deniable soupçon of sarcasm, and his eyes lingered just a little too long on Rogers’ almost parodically chiseled jaw.

Rogers sighed heavily and turned to face me.  “Where’s the Cube?” he asked bluntly.

I just smiled as if I had no idea what he was talking about.

“There’s your answer,” Rogers said, then stalked away toward the cockpit.

“You know, I don’t think he really even tried,” Stark remarked to me in a low, confidential tone.  I pulled my eyebrows together in an effort to look sympathetic.  Stark snorted, shook his head at me, and then followed Rogers.

We flew on in tense silence until Fury’s voice crackled from a radio at the front of the plane.  “He saying anything?” the voice demanded.

“Not a word,” Romanoff said tightly.

“Just get him here.  We’re low on time,” Fury snapped.

Rogers stepped closer to Stark to murmur “I don’t like it” under his breath—as if that could keep me from hearing him, with a god’s senses and at such close quarters.

“What, Rock of Ages giving up so easily?” Stark replied, low but not hushed; he, apparently, knew better than to try.

“I don’t remember it being that easy.  This guy packs a wallop,” Rogers whispered.  The look he directed at me over his shoulder was so charmingly confused.

“Still, you are pretty spry, for an older fellow,” Stark said mildly.  “What’s your thing, pilates?”

“What?”

I sympathized with Rogers.  The All-Tongue gave me only the vaguest idea what he was talking about.  I missed having Barton on hand—though in truth he was as often a source of confusion as of clarification.

“It’s like calisthenics.  You might have missed a couple things, you know—doing time as a… Capsicle.”

The look Rogers gave him could have shriveled a forest in full summer foliage.

Rogers disdained to reply to that remark.  Instead he said, in a tone as withering as his gaze, “Fury didn’t tell me he was calling you in.”

“Yeah.  There’s a lot of things Fury doesn’t tell you,” Stark said, looking away, his voice flat.  He turned back to meet Rogers’ gaze, and the tension humming between them was such that I wasn’t sure whether one of them was going to punch the other or kiss him.  The latter would have been extremely entertaining, though for my larger purposes I had to prefer the former.

This little family drama was interrupted by a sudden bolt of lightning (from outside the plane, not between the two men, shockingly enough).  “Where is this coming from?” Romanoff asked, sounding unnerved.

I, of course, knew precisely where it was coming from.  Even if I hadn’t been expecting Thor to be sent to try to stop me once Heimdall had detected my presence in Midgard, I would have recognized the peculiar feel of the storms that Thor called with Mjölnir, the smell of an elemental magic both vaster and less refined than my own, a taste of distant stars that reminded me oddly of falling through the wormhole left by the collapsed Bifröst.

I had known that I would have to face him, but still that all-too-familiar taste made my heart speed, my stomach clench, and the blood seem to flee from my face and hands, leaving them tingling with cold sweat.  I didn’t want to be confronted with the pitiful life I had led in Asgard, slinking around in Thor’s shadow, my presence accepted only because it was an inevitable concomitant of his; choking down all the mockery and disdain he and his lackeys threw at me while hoping for one of the occasional scraps of praise he let fall along with it.  I didn’t want to be reminded of all the love and loyalty I had wasted.  My sun, the blinding star around which my whole life had revolved, had collapsed in my eyes, and now I saw it for what it truly was: a black hole that heedlessly consumed whatever came into its reach, but could never be expected to give anything back.

“What’s the matter?  Scared of a little lightning?” Rogers asked sharply when he saw my unease (forgetting, apparently, his conviction of the futility of speaking to me).

“I’m not overly fond of what follows,” I said, clipped and icy.

The _thud_ on the roof of the Quinjet and the ensuing jolt startled me, perhaps, but came as no surprise.  The mortals, however, looked unsettled, even frightened.  Stark put on his helmet, walked toward the back of the plane, and opened the rear hatch—which may have been a mistake, because it gave Thor an obvious way in, or may have been very fortunate, because it meant that he didn’t have to break one of the windows.

“What are you doing?” Rogers shouted over the roar of air and thunder.

Thor landed on hand and knee on the ramp of the Quinjet, golden hair and blood-red cloak whipping impressively in the wind.  His talent for making an entrance rivaled my own, and indeed he surpassed me in his ability to make the grandeur seem completely unplanned.  He flowed to his feet and Mjölnir struck the Iron Man in the center of his chest, sending him flying toward the front of the plane to land on his back.

Thor gave him not a second thought, but charged straight toward me.  He grasped me by the front of my tunic and pulled me out of the straps that were meant to secure me to the seat, snapping them as easily as if they were cobwebs.  I was trying desperately not to panic, or vomit.  I had known this was coming; I had planned for it; and yet seeing Thor in the flesh seemed to scatter all my resolution, all my neatly-laid plans, leaving my mind empty of anything but terror and grief.  His grip moved from my tunic to my throat and I wondered if he would kill me then and there.  I wondered if I hoped he would.  But no, he gripped me by the shoulder (not the one that had been shot, fortunately), spun Mjölnir, and flew us out the rear of the Quinjet.

I had flown with Thor before, but never had the thrill of it been so thoroughly eclipsed by dread.  The wind whistled past us far too loudly for either of us to say anything and be heard, but the stony expression on his face already spoke volumes.  _There is no love lost between us,_ said a voice in my head that might have been mine and might have been Thanos’s.  _There was never any love.  I was only ever a burden.  Now, at least, I have the distinction of being an enemy._

Thor was angling down toward the nearest mountain crag, and as we approached it he released his hold on me so that I landed hard on my back, which was already smarting from being blasted against a set of stone steps, not to mention the jarring trip through the portal not two days before.  As soon as I could stop groaning, I started laughing—or wheezing, more like.  So much for my plan to save myself pain by surrendering.  But then, I could never expect anything but pain where Thor was concerned.

“Where is the Tesseract?” were the first words out of Thor’s mouth.  Of course.  Should I have expected anything different?

“I’ve missed you, too,” I said with as much acid as I could inject into my voice while I was still fighting for breath.

“Do I look to be in a gaming mood?” Thor growled at me.

 _I don’t know; I can’t see you because you just dropped me flat on my back,_ I was tempted to snap in return.  Instead I sat up with another groan and hissed, “You should thank me.  With the Bifröst gone, how much dark energy did the All-Father have to muster to conjure you here?  Your precious Earth?”

Weary of looking up at Thor from the ground, I started to struggle to my feet, trying to ignore the protests of my screaming back; I directed a small amount of magic toward dulling the pain so that I could focus better on my adversary.  But while I was still working on pushing myself upright, Thor dropped Mjölnir with an echoing _clang_ , grabbed me by the elbow to pull me to my feet, and clapped his other hand around the back of my neck.  It was an all-too-familiar gesture of affection—a caress, almost—that he had offered countless times during the centuries we had spent believing we were brothers.  I was tempted to lean into it, tempted to give in to the comfort I had learned to take almost instinctively from his touch.  But I held myself tense, reminded myself that it was all a lie, had always been a lie.

“I thought you dead,” Thor said.  It was an accusation, but what was the crime: not having returned sooner, or having returned at all?

“Did you mourn?” I asked, a quiet sneer in my voice.

“We all did,” Thor insisted.  “Our father—”

 _I didn’t ask about ‘all of you,’ I didn’t ask about ‘our father,’ I asked if_ you _mourned,_ I didn’t say.  I pointed a rebuking finger in his face and corrected, “ _Your_ father.”  I slapped Thor’s caressing hand away and he drew back, looking affronted.  I gave him an unapologetic shrug.  “He did tell you my true parentage, did he not?”  I could scarcely stomach that confused, wounded expression he wore, like a dog that had been kicked for no offense it could recall, so I walked away from him, one hand pressed to my still-aching back.

But of course he came after me, protesting, “We were raised together, we played together, we fought together.  Do you remember none of that?”

 _Oh, I remember all too well._ “I remember a shadow,” I said coldly, slowly turning back to confront him with all the hate in my eyes.  “Living in the shade of _your_ greatness.”  The wounded look on his face intensified, to my sick satisfaction, and encouraged me to press on.  “I remember you tossing me into an abyss, I who was and should be king.”

As soon as the words left my mouth, something about them seemed wrong.  The _memory_ seemed wrong—lacking depth, lacking detail.  I remembered falling from the bridge when Thor broke it, catching one end of Gungnir while Thor, hanging above me from Odin’s grip on his foot, caught the other.  I remembered with shame my foolish plea to Odin, trying to explain that I had done only what I thought would please him.  _“No, Loki,”_ he had said quietly: such an understated way to pronounce a death sentence!  I remembered a feeling of cold spreading through my whole body, my numb fingers losing their grip and starting to slide down Gungnir’s haft.  Then Thor said _“Loki, no”_ and pulled upward, wrenching the spear from my hands, shaking me off like a filthy stray dog that had latched onto his boot…

But what was the tone with which he had said the words?  Was it mocking?  Angry?  Disappointed, like Odin’s?  I tried to hear it again in my head, and to my great puzzlement it sounded almost… anguished.  But why?  Did it grieve him to have to cast me away?  Did he not do it gladly?

I did not have long to puzzle over it then because Thor retorted, incredulous, “So you take the world I love as recompense for your imagined slights?  No, the Earth is under my protection, Loki!”

 _The world_ you _love?_  As if three days’ involuntary exile and one kiss with a mortal woman gave him a deeper connection to the realm than my centuries of visiting every few decades to make a study of its thought and culture?  And worse still— _imagined_ slights?  Had I only imagined him saying _“Some do battle, others just do tricks”_ or _“Know your place, brother”_?  Was throwing me to my near-certain death only an imagined slight?

(Of course, as I realized some time later, it was—though perhaps ‘imagined’ is not quite the right word, nor does ‘misremembered’ entirely capture the peculiarities of the case.  For a while I wondered why Thor did not dispute the point directly, but it has occurred to me that perhaps even my oaf of a— that oaf has the sense and even, dare I say, emotional sensitivity not to say, “Oh no, you attempted suicide, don’t you remember?” to someone who has, in fact, attempted suicide.)

But it would not do to dwell on my grievances: that would only make me seem weak.  Instead I laughed at him.  “And you’re doing a marvelous job with that.  The humans slaughter each other in droves while you idly fret.  I mean to _rule_ them—as why should I not?”

“You think yourself above them,” Thor said, sounding disappointed, almost pitying.

“Well, yes,” I replied.  What, and he didn’t—claiming to be the Earth’s benevolent protector?

“Then you miss the truth of ruling, brother,” Thor told me, sounding appallingly sincere, his voice almost cracking with it.  “A throne would suit you ill.”

I was stunned.  This from the arrogant pup who not a year ago had swaggered down the aisle of Asgard’s throne room to be crowned, flirting with the crowd, urging on their adulation, boastfully flipping his ancient enchanted hammer to impress them as if it were no more to him than a juggler’s knife?  This from the blustering fool who had stormed into an enemy kingdom with only four other warriors at his back, looking for a fight that could lead only to a bloody war?  He thought to lecture _me_ on the qualities of a good ruler?  Still playing father’s pet after all these years, no longer by showing off his warrior’s might and militancy, but by mouthing at me the lesson of humility he had supposedly mastered in the span of three days.

For a few moments I was too outraged to speak, to look anymore at his earnest, condescending face.  Instead I snarled and pushed him out of my way to head back up toward the peak where we’d landed: I needed the Avengers to be able to spot us if I was to carry out the rest of my plan, which Thor seemed intent on spoiling.  “I’ve seen worlds you’ve never known about,” I growled as I walked away from my oblivious hypocrite of a former brother.  “I have grown, _Odin’s son,_ in my exile.  I have seen the true power of the Tesseract, and when I wield it—”

“Who showed you this power?” he cut in, too quickly.  _Damn my mouth—I shouldn’t talk while I’m angry._ “Who controls the would-be king?”

“I am a king!” I shouted at him, hoping to distract him from his entirely too perceptive question.  _But why don’t I want him to ask that question?_ wondered a quiet, nagging voice in some corner of my mind.  I could not let him see me as a servant to a greater power, conquering not on my own behalf but at the command of someone who held my reins.  The game was lost if he realized how powerless I truly was.

In any case, my misdirection gambit was successful.  “Not here!” he shouted back, gripping me by my arms and shaking me.  “You give up the Tesseract, you give up this poisonous dream!”  The rage on his face twisted into something else, and one hand moved upward from my arm to clasp my shoulder and then the back of my neck again, an awful parody of tenderness.  “You come home,” he ordered me, and it sounded almost like a plea.

I searched Thor’s eyes and wondered how someone with such shallow understanding could so convincingly mimic the pain of loss and betrayed love. _What if it isn’t a parody?_ that same quiet voice wondered, before I shut it out.  Such thoughts could only betray me again to the enemy Thanos had shown me: my wide-eyed adoration for my big brother, the naïve hope that he might love me in return.  I could never come home to that.

 _When Orestes returns, it will be to wreak bloody vengeance on your guilty house,_ I thought, and then an image flashed into my mind from the dream that had troubled my meager hours of sleep: corpses lining the halls of Asgard’s palace, imprisoned in ice or mutilated by fire.

I covered my unease with a small contemptuous laugh and pointedly ignored Thor’s attempt to appeal to my sentimentality.  “I don’t have it,” was all I said.

Thor instantly dropped his pretense of affection, drew away from me with a snarl, summoned Mjölnir to his hand, and raised it threateningly.

“You need the Cube to bring me home, but I’ve sent it off I know not where,” I continued genially.

“Listen well, brother,” Thor said through gritted teeth, pointing Mjölnir warningly at me.  I never found out what he was going to say next, because a streak of red-and-gold-tinged light collided with him from above and bore him down off the mountain crag.  The Iron Man, coming to my rescue (though he likely did not intend it that way).

“I’m listening,” I said to no one.  Well, at least I amused myself.

I stood on the lip of the crag to watch the delightful drama that was about to unfold before me.  I sent an invisible, silent projection after Thor and Stark so that I could better see and hear what passed between them.

To my satisfaction, Stark treated Thor much as Thor had treated me, dropping him ungracefully onto his back in the dirt of a forest floor on a hillside below while Stark skidded to a halt on his feet.  Thor scrambled to his feet, hair in disarray, and hastily disentangled himself from his cloak.  “Do not touch me again,” he growled.

“Then don’t take my stuff,” Stark replied, unrepentant.

Oh, this was excellent: the mortal dared challenge a god, the mightiest of Asgardian warriors, no less.  I had already seen the tension between Rogers and Stark, two strong-willed lead horses pulling the team in opposite directions; put my truculent bull-headed brother into harness with them, and the disarray Barton had predicted was a surety.

“You have no idea what you’re dealing with,” Thor intoned.

Stark was unimpressed.  “Uh… Shakespeare in the park?” he suggested.  Adopting a dramatic pose, he declaimed, “Doth Mother know you weareth her drapes?”

Back on the mountaintop, I laughed.  It was funny, mangled verb conjugation and all, though I doubted Thor would understand or appreciate the humor.

“This is beyond you, metal man,” Thor warned, as humorless as I predicted.  “Loki will face Asgardian justice.”  _Oh I will, will I?_

“He gives up the Cube, he’s all yours,” Stark assured him.  “Till then”—he slammed his faceplate down conclusively—“stay out of the way.”  He turned and walked away, muttering, “Tourist.”

But of course Thor was not to be put off so easily.  I did not entirely expect him to hurl Mjölnir at a mortal, even one in armor.  Fortunately, Stark’s armor was very sturdy—more so than the tree he was flung into, which splintered on impact.

And so the battle was joined.  I smiled to myself and settled down with my (still-aching) back against a rock to enjoy the spectacle.  Every blow they exchanged was one more grudge they would carry into their reluctant partnership, if they even managed to form one.  More than that, I do not scruple to admit, something in me thrilled to see Thor fighting on my account, even if he was only fighting for the right to take me into custody and deliver me to my well-deserved punishment.  At least he cared about my fate to that degree.

But even as I watched, I found myself distracted from the details of the battle (who had the upper hand on whom; and oh, now they were flying about, locked together, one dragging the other up a cliff face—who was dragging whom was unclear, but sparks were flying and it didn’t look pleasant—now felling more trees on their way back down) by those nagging thoughts that something about my memories, my perceptions—even my emotions—was not right.  Why could I not remember the tone of Thor’s voice when he said _“Loki, no”_ before casting me into the abyss?

And why, truly, did I not want Thor to know that someone had provided me with my scepter and my army and shown me how the Tesseract could be used?  Perhaps it would help my cause if he knew that I had a powerful patron backing me.  _My cause?_ Was it truly my cause now?  How much did I want this?  To rule over a unified Midgard and shape it according to my will?  To have my revenge on the family, so-called, that had deceived, abused, and abandoned me?  Or was it truly: to defend the Tesseract for Thanos and be ready to turn it over to him whenever he should call for it?   _“You think you know pain?”_ the Other’s voice hissed in my head, almost as clearly as if he were there again.  _“He will make you long for something sweet as pain…”_

I had not wanted to do this, not at first—the memory came to me faintly, uncertainly, as if from a distant childhood.  Thanos had persuaded me that I wanted to, not only with pain and the threat of worse (though there had been enough of that), but by reminding me of the wrongs that Thor and Odin had done me, keeping them constantly at the forefront of my mind.  _‘Reminding’ me?_   No, that was not right.  He had put them _before_ my mind over and over, keeping me inside them, living them; tearing the wounds open again and reinfecting them, lest they should ever show signs of being ready to heal.

 _Reinfecting…_ had Thanos in fact made the wounds worse than they had been to begin with?  _Could_ he do such a thing, I wondered: twist my memories to make me hate Thor and Odin more than I already did—to make me willing to jump at any opportunity to spite them, even if it was offered by my captor and tormenter?  Surely he could not, I thought; why, then, would he have spent so much time making me relive the same memories?  He could have made me believe anything: that Odin had starved or beaten me, that Frigga had neglected me, that Thor had never said a kind word or shown a moment of warmth; that I had never loved them at all.  Why had he not done that, if he could change my memories at will?  Unless it was not quite _at will_ …

But then I had no more time to reflect on the matter, because there was a new entrant in the contest below: Captain Rogers had parachuted in from the Quinjet (oh, that means he slowed his fall with a very large piece of fabric… rudimentary but really quite ingenious) and interrupted the battle by bouncing his shield off the combatants’ heads (Thor’s, it had been revealed in the course of their struggle, was harder, despite the metal that encased Stark’s).

“That’s enough!” Rogers barked, officer-like, from his perch atop the slanted spar of a broken tree.  He jumped to the ground and began, “Now, I don’t know what you plan on doing here…”

“I’ve come here to put an end to Loki’s schemes!” Thor interrupted him, nostrils flaring, still breathing hard.

“Then prove it.”  Rogers’ voice was low, but still held the steel of command.  “Put that hammer down.”

I was very glad that my attention had been called back to the confrontation below; this was going to be delicious.  I was all but licking my lips.

“Uh, yeah, no.  Bad call.”  Stark’s electronically channeled voice seemed to echo my thoughts on the matter.  “He loves his—”  He didn’t get to utter the very obvious completion of that sentence, because the item in question knocked him backward to land among the splintered trees.

“You want me to put the hammer down?” Thor roared, and launched himself at Captain Rogers, who raised his shield over his head.

The force of the impact impressed even me, who had seen (and felt) the might of both hammer and shield.  Star-forged uru came down on vibranium with a sound like the largest gong in the Nine Realms and a disc of blue-white light that spread like the ripples of a boulder crashing into a lake, knocked Thor flying, and severed every tree in a fifty-foot radius at exactly the height where Rogers’ shield had been held.

Once the echoes had faded and the dust of collapsing trees had almost settled, the three men staggered to their feet.  “Are we done here?” Rogers asked wearily.

Up on my perch on the crag above, I applauded, though unheard and unseen by the actors in the drama I had witnessed.  I could not have written the script better myself.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was encouraged by readers on Tumblr to leave in the little hints of (Loki shipping) Steve/Tony or "Superhusbands"; sorry if that's not your thing.


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